I’ve posted on SSRN the working draft of a paper that will be published in the University of Illinois Law Review and was part of a symposium hosted by the review in March. Here’s the abstract:

The standard system of statewide elections for governor and US senator, among other offices, deserves a thorough overhaul. The collection of signatures by candidates to qualify for the ballot, currently confined to antiquated pen-and-paper technology, can be modernized and put online, so that it can function as a kind of “approval voting” system that yields a reasonable number of candidates (five or so) for a primary election ballot. Likewise, online party conventions can enable parties to endorse candidates before the primary occurs and to have their endorsed nominees qualify for the government’s “All Qualified Candidates Primary” ballot. Moreover, innovative forms of Ranked Choice Voting (like Total Vote Runoff) can be used to identify the two candidates on the primary ballot most suitable to advance to the general election, with suitability for this purpose determined by which candidates are most preferred by a majority of voters. A version of “fusion voting” can be employed in the general election to permit parties whose nominees are not one of the two finalists for the general election to renominate whichever of these two they prefer. A new electoral system with these elements would be the best method for achieving general election winners to hold a statewide office, like governor or US senator, who are most representative of the state’s electorate as a whole.

There is also this introductory note explaining the relationship of this paper to some of my other recent (and future) work:

This draft follows several previous essays on electoral system reform, some of which are already published and some still in the law review editing process. (If interested, the reader can find citations to these previous essays in the few footnotes included in this early working draft.) The plan is to use all these essays as the foundation for a book that will explore the historical and theoretical relationship of (1) Madisonian constitutionalism and (2) the mathematics of social choice that grew out of contemporaneous Enlightenment work, especially two French thinkers: Borda and Condorcet. The book will explore the extent to which weaving post-Enlightenment social choice developments, emanating from Borda and Condorcet, into an updated version of Madisonian constitutionalism can help redress some of the difficulties of collective self-government currently afflicting the United States. This paper focuses more specifically on the social choice aspects of the larger overall project.  

I plan to revise this paper over the summer and also begin to work on the larger book project for which this and other recent papers provide a foundation. Because this paper is very much still a work-in-progress and because the book project itself has not yet begun, I very much welcome comments and suggestions. Thanks!