Chapter 15 Holding a Round-robin Tournament Among All the Candidates: Optimizing Round One of a Two-round Electoral System

Partisan primaries combined with "sore loser" laws prevent general election voters from electing the candidate whom a majority of them prefer.This occurs whenever the majority of general election voters would prefer a candidate who was eliminated from contention in the partisan primary.Eliminating "sore loser" laws, however, would not solve the problem because that would risk too many candidates on the general election ballot.The solution instead is to restructure primary elections so that they function as a preliminary tournament among all the candidates running for the office in question regardless of their party affiliation.Because primary elections are paid for and operated by the government, they need to serve the public and not merely partisan purposes, and the best way for primaries to serve the public interest is for them to operate as preliminary tournaments.The form of a preliminary tournament among all candidates that would be most conducive to the purpose of holding a democratic election is one in which the voters evaluate each candidate in comparison to each other candidate.This head-to-head comparison for each pair of candidates is equivalent to a round-robin sports tournament.As in those sports tournaments, the two candidates who do best in these head-to-head comparisons (by being preferred by a majority of voters over most other candidates, with a suitable tiebreaker as necessary when two or more candidates have the same number of head-tohead victories) advance to a final round of the competition, where an ultimate winner is determined.