Fairvote, a leading proponent of ranked choice voting, has been running a series of events to celebrate its 25^th anniversary. It all culminates in the Champions of Democracy Awards Reception, in New York on Monday night.

I think it’s appropriate to send congratulations to Krist Novoselic, who’s been serving as Fairvote’s Chair for nearly a decade.

By taking on such a prominent role in such a venerable organization, he’s become a key figure in the effort to build a 21^st century American democracy worthy of the name. From what I’ve learned about his career, it’s a position that fits his longstanding commitments to free speech, civic education, constitutional government, and open collaboration.

Fairvote’s stated mission is to be a trailblazer for bold, nonpartisan election reform. The community attracts people who want to fix our broken democracy. And it empowers people throughout the United States who are dedicated to making repairs that endure.

The organization began to take shape in 1992 using the name Citizens for Proportional Representation. It later rebranded itself as the Center for Voting and Democracy and ultimately as Fairvote. The banner evolved to illuminate the goal.

A quarter century of persistence on behalf of any noble mission is impressive, but achieving fundamental election reform isn’t around the corner. Twenty-five years of accumulated experience means recognizing there will be thirty, forty, fifty and more. And the stakes are higher than ever.

Twenty-five years ago, when FairVote took root, the United States dominated the geopolitical stage. President George H.W. Bush believed he was forging a New World Order that would put the “rule of law” (American-flavored, of course) over the “law of the jungle.” That same year, Krist Novoselic was playing on stages all across the planet. He was in a band that upended the existing musical order by putting honesty, empathy and inclusive morality over superficial and exploitive commercialism.

In 2017 it’s obvious that the superpower hasn’t aged as well as the rock star.

These days it’s not uncommon to hear that this nation’s preeminence has faded, along with respect for the values that once made American culture so vital. We now find ourselves in a world where dictatorships and illiberalism and vicious ethno-nationalism are on the rise. More ominously, we find ourselves in a country led by people who are happy to shrug off those trends, and even welcome them.

That’s why it’s so important to celebrate people who dare to be Champions of Democracy. When we’re thirsty for positive signs, they remind us to look for democracy’s wellsprings in traditional American principles such as free association, fair elections, and responsible self-governance.  Those champions point the way with durability and resolution, and demonstrate how to be effective stewards in practice.

We deserve a modern electoral system. Reform is badly overdue. It’s necessary to admit just how badly things are broken in order to appreciate the size of the challenge. But by facing it we can also appreciate the redemptive capacity of America. Because every step toward democracy ever taken in America was badly overdue.

The glory of our history is that so many people keep daring to take those steps.  The virtue of groups like FairVote, and activists like Krist Novoselic, is that their footprints are so fresh.

Nevermind the images

Sygnol top-level candidates.

Here’s another illustration of the listicle sorting app I’m putting together. For now, I’m still making images by hand. But I’m also moving ahead on building tools for automated assembly.

This 4×4 grid is a draft for the top level of the Sygnol namespace, presented in alphabetical order.  When the system goes live, you’d be able to rearrange the tiles. That interaction would power features such as playlist-making and ranked-choice polling.  You’d also be able to navigate into sortable sublists. For example, selecting OS — the flag for Oscars — would take you into a 3×3 grid of Best Picture nominees, similar to what I presented earlier.

As more content is added, grids would get much larger, and sub-channels would proliferate.

Sygnol is intended to model a new direction for civic software and liquid democracy. It’s inspired, in part, by sites such as 2008’s 10Questions and 3 American Questions from 2016. Those election-year experiments were launched with the goal of giving voters a direct way to compare candidates’ official statements on key policy issues.

10Questions’ ambitious interactive web site was hosted by the New York-based Personal Democracy Forum, heavily promoted by the New York Times, and generously funded by the Knight Foundation. Unfortunately, the candidates ignored it, just as they later ignored the 3 American Questions site. That latter project didn’t produce much more than a few videos explaining the concept, but its featured topics were very well thought out: Climate Change, Federal Debt, and Confidence in Government. So they’ll be available in the inaugural Sygnol namespace as CC, FD, and GV.

I’ll explain the other prospective topics in due course, but one I want to emphasize is ER — Election Reform. It’s central to Sygnol’s mission. An earlier ranked choice interface I built had a poll on Priorities for Improving US Elections. This version is being designed to cover many more issues at far greater depth.

Sygnol

Ben Carson now averages close to 20% in national polls… A lot of voters will be shopping for a new political champion if he falters. There’s no sign of that now, but no one is immune from the inevitable weeding out process in the GOP contest. The dataset collected by Civinomics.com allows us to consider things might play out if he left the race.

Carson supporters dominated the raw tally collected from the Civinomics straw poll. Most of the responses were given in August. Now the site displays results in a reweighted form, showing Trump in the lead. It’s an adjustment designed to reflect national public opinion standings. (Some of the AimsPoll analytics make similar adjustments, as explained here).

Nevertheless, it’s clear that a huge swarm of Carson voters ranked their preferences at the Civinomics site. That high turnout gives a clearer and sharper voice to the views of Carson supporters nationwide.

Both the raw and reweighted datasets indicate that Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz are by far the most popular 2nd and 3rd choices among Carson supporters. Each won about 50% of 2nd and 3rd ranks. Both would be likely to gain significantly if Carson left the race.

The methodology employed to build the chart shown here uses only those responses where all candidates were ranked. While the preferences may look nearly tied, it’s worth mentioning that Fiorina had a clear advantage over Cruz by around 5% in the raw tally.

Overall, Carson supporters are ambivalent about Donald Trump. He wins just under 20% of their 2nd and 3rd choice votes, but is soundly rejected by around 34% of them, who put him as their last choice.

Carson supporters are not ambivalent about Carson. Their relatively solid readiness to coalesce around similar alternatives could be taken as an indication that they have coalesced even more solidly around their first choice. Fiorina and Cruz may have a chance to win the voters over, as long as Carson decides to stay in the race. But they’ll have to work hard for it.

Carson supporters present a strong sense of what they want in a candidate… an aggressively cerebral economic and moralistic social conservative who is clearly not already one of the establishment bums he or she promises to throw out. Trump may also be a clear outsider like Carson and Fiorina, but few would consider his appeal cerebral or moralistic.

* * *

Though a relatively small contingent of Jeb Bush voters responded to the Civinomics straw poll, enough showed up to sketch a map of where his support has been going… and where the remainder of it might end up.

It appears that Kasich and Rubio are best positioned to pick off Bush supporters. It’s no surpirse that his drop in the polls has correlated with Rubio’s rise. It’s also quite evident from this chart that potential Bush defectors have no taste for Trump.

If Bush wants to recover his supporters and perhaps even gain some, he’ll have to compete more effectively against those candidates who have been most successful at gathering up defectors. One expects that stopping Trump might be a common priority for all of those voters, presumably for the sake of making sure the Republicans beat the Democrats in the general election. This offers a sense of how many voters within the GOP still prefer not-too-brash mainstream politicians who are relatively close to the GOP’s establishment.

* * *

This series has been using a dataset collected by Civinomics.com to prototype some examples of ranked choice public opinion research analytics. Read here and here for background methodology. More advanced Instant Runoff and Condorcet visualizations and will be presented as time and resources permit, hopefully with a fresh datasets.

For more about Sygnol Analytics and ranked choice data visualizations, follow Sygnol on YouTube.