For those tuning into the discussion of systemic election refrom, this NCSL doc lays out the sorts of primaries used in America. There are degrees of openess. https://t.co/yUP4SCzjXi#AEIElectionReform pic.twitter.com/bRrWQeqOdS
— Kevin R Kosar (@kevinrkosar) December 4, 2023
Another idea for reforming the candidate selection system is ranked-choice voting, in which primary voters rank their candidate choices from most to least favorite. If no candidate wins a majority of the votes in the first round, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated; his or her voters’ second choices are distributed among the remaining candidates. This process continues until one candidate gets a majority.
This means that no candidate can be the winner just by getting more votes than any of the other guys. It also means that to win a majority, a candidate will have to appeal to a broader range of eligible voters instead of single-mindedly pursuing a narrow, polarizing block of the voting public. In fact, there is some evidence that in Virginia’s Republican gubernatorial primary this year, ranked-choice voting produced a candidate, Glenn Youngkin, who—while decidedly conservative—showed himself to have enough broad appeal to succeed in a purple, blue-trending state.
No single system is guaranteed to produce candidates who are both popular and fit for office. No selection system can, by itself, fix the current state of our political parties. But an advantage of ranked-choice voting is that it provides a potential corrective to problematic populist campaigning by installing a selection system that can be said to be as democratic as, or even more democratic than, the system currently in place.
There is no other state where Democrats wield the absolute power the party enjoys in California. Democrats occupy every statewide office and command two-thirds majorities in both houses. Former GOP strongholds like Orange County have shaded blue. Republicans don’t just lag behind Democrats — there are also fewer registered Republicans than no-party-preference voters.
Before 2011, when the state replaced party primaries with a general primary after which the top two vote-getters square off in the general election, establishment-backed Democrats running in safe seats could often sail to assured victories; now, they often findthemselves fighting for their political lives against a rival from their own party.
The liberal-versus-moderate dynamic in California presaged not only the rift that blew open in this year’s presidential primaries, it established its parameters: between unions and environmental activists; between single-payer advocates and Democrats working to expand coverage within the health care system; between educational reformers and teachers unions; between law enforcement and those who regard the legal system as hopelessly biased against communities of color.
California’s experience with top-two voting, rather than partisan primaries, also offers a lesson for other states that are dominated by a single party — like Democrats in Massachusetts or Republicans in Mississippi. In safe seats that would have allowed an earlier generation of Democrats to comfortably coast to victory, California now regularly sees battles between Democrats who differ on issues that otherwise would split along party lines.
Traditionally conservative interests like the oil industry and charter schools increasingly court friendly Democrats — often by contributing money to a constellation of innocuously named political action committees that then spend millions on advertising: In districts where a Democratic win looks inevitable, the thinking goes, better to boost the Democrat who’s likely to vote with you than a Republican who is likely to lose.
David Townsend, a Sacramento political consultant, said he used to have to work to convince business-oriented groups on the wisdom of getting behind Democrats. Now that tactic has become so ingrained that Townsend said he has “a waiting list” of interested players hoping to invest in moderate Democrats.
“Year in and year out the business community, the health care community, the insurance community can look at all the scorecards and see where mods have been on their issues and on trying to tamp down too much regulation,” Townsend said. “We don’t have to do the sell anymore. Everyone totally gets how important the mods are.”
The Democratic presidential race has shifted in the days after South Carolina’s primary, as Tom Steyer, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar dropped out in quick succession. But the departures so close to Super Tuesday create a complication: The candidates’ names are still on the ballot, and many early voters have already cast meaningless votes for them.
California, for example, has 415 delegates on the line on Tuesday. It has also successfully encouraged people to vote by absentee ballot. In the 2018 primary election, 67 percent of all votes were cast outside of an in-person polling place, according to the Los Angeles Times. This year, officials have already received 20 percent of the mailed-out ballots, which is likely a hefty portion of the state’s votes. A number of those will be for Steyer, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar—as well as Andrew Yang, who dropped out after early voting began.
...
In most states, no. In some states, if you can beat your own absentee ballot to the polling place, you might be OK. Michigan, which votes next week, specifically allows you to come in and “spoil” your ballot, negating the earlier and requesting a new one. Minnesota allowed people to switch votes, but the deadline for that passed last week, before Buttigieg and Klobuchar had announced their decisions.
According to the Times, voters should be careful: If Californians cast a ballot at their polling place in hopes it will counteract their first ballot, they run the risk of violating state election law.
In most races, with a handful of candidates, names appear in a single column on one page of the voting booklet, a clear sign to voters that they should only pick one. But with 34 candidates, the geography of ballot templates tends to favor listing the names in two, side-by-side columns, on facing pages of the voting booklet.
That's where the trouble lies for the Senate race, as voters could mistake the two columns as two distinct races and choose one name from each list. That would result in an "overvote," a ballot cast for two or more candidates, which is thus disqualified.
The two-column layout gained notoriety in the 2000 presidential race with the so-called "butterfly ballot" design in Palm Beach County, Fla. Already, some have similar fears about what could happen in California.
In early April, a team of ballot design experts joined elections officials in Santa Cruz County to test a variety of side-by-side options for arranging the Senate candidates' names. In trial runs, they found that no matter how they tinkered with the format, more than one-third of the mock ballots were marked with an overvote.
▪ Though concluding that the top-two primary “did not, in the end, discernibly alter the outcomes of the 2014 primaries,” Thad Kousser, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, finds the system helped shape the field of candidates in some races.
...
▪ In the controller’s race, where an unexpected surge by an unknown Republican named David Evans nearly left Democrats without a candidate in the November runoff, Kousser wrote “the quirks of the top-two structure and a crowded field on the left side of the ideological spectrum … nearly yielded a Democratic – and, arguably, a small ‘d’ democratic – disaster.’”
...
▪ While proponents of the top-two primary system have said the system could help decrease political polarization and improve the prospects of more moderate candidates, a review of Congressional contests in 2012 suggests the top-two system largely failed to achieve that goal.
One reason why, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, is that people didn’t know much about where candidates fell on the ideological spectrum.
...
▪ And all that ignorance is despite our ability to use Google.
Analyzing public “Google Trends” data for California state legislators from June 2010 to February 2013, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis found lawmakers facing challenges from members of their own party in a runoff election were associated with a 13 percent to 15 percent increase in searches ahead of the election.The system has failed utterly in improving turnout. Voter participation in both the primary and general election was at a record low.
...
The full journal, published by the Institute of Governmental Studies at University of California, Berkeley, can be found here.
He withdrew too late for his name to be removed from the ballot, but still, it was shocking to see that more than a quarter of a million voters [the number will tick upward with the counting of provisional and mail ballots] - 9.8 percent of those who voted - thought he would be an effective statewide leader. He even beat serious contenders Derek Cressman and Dan Schnur.
And even in his hometown of San Francisco, where news of his travails have been blasted for months, 10,494 voters chose Yee. That's an even higher percentage than statewide, at 12.4 percent. So we can't take our usual tactic and just blame L.A.
We asked some political experts to explain this bizarre result. But even they're perplexed.
"It's a stumper," said political consultant Maggie Muir. "I don't have a great answer for that."
There are a mix of not-so-great answers, though. Yee's very familiar to voters, having been on many ballots over the course of decades. He has a popular Chinese name and that can attract Chinese voters. He's a Democrat in a blue state. And his ballot designation sounded legit.
"His ballot designation was state senator - not accused felon," said Corey Cook, a political science professor at the University of San Francisco. "You don't expect somebody accused of those things to be on the ballot. You're not thinking, 'Hey, isn't that the guy ...'Dan Walters reports at The Sacramento Bee:
The official election night returns were that just 3.2 million or 18.3 percent of the state's 17.7 million registered voters cast ballots, but those numbers will increase when the number of still-uncounted ballots becomes clear in the next few days.
"I'm going to be surprised if it doesn't get to 20 or 23 percent," Paul Mitchell, a political number analyst for Political Data, Inc., said Wednesday.
Reaching 23 percent would mean another 800,000 or so ballots, mostly mail-in ballots delivered to election officials in the final hours of the election, remain to be counted.
However, even were turnout to reach 23 percent, that still would be five percentage points below the lowest statewide primary turnout ever recorded, 28.22 percent in June, 2008.Why?
Doug Ahler, Jack Citrin, and Gabriel Lenz conducted an experiment where people voted either using the new top-two ballot or the old closed primary ballot. Moderate candidates fared no better when people voted with the top-two ballot. Thad Kousser, Justin Phillips, and Boris Shor investigated the effect of the top-two primary on representation. They found that legislators tended to stray further from their district’s average voter under the top-two primary than before. In other words, the new California system has improved neither polarization or accountability.
Why don’t these reforms appear to work? There are a variety of reasons. Perhaps there aren’t enough true independents voting to make open primaries a means of reducing polarization. Voters may lack the necessary information or aptitude to distinguish among more moderate and more extreme candidates. Or party elites and donors may ensure that only extreme candidates end up deciding to run.
Tennessee state Sen. Frank Nicely, a Republican from Strawberry Plains, has introduced S.B. 471, which would, beginning in 2016, eliminate party primaries for the U.S. Senate in Tennessee. Members of the state Legislature would instead select the nominees. Republican House and Senate caucuses would pick the GOP nominee, and their Democratic counterparts would select their candidate. State Rep. Harry Brooks, R-Knoxville, has also introduced the bill in the Tennessee General Assembly.Actually, there is serious criticism of the 17th Amendment. Citing concerns for federalism, some thoughtful writers have suggested repeal.
My first reaction was to be dismissive. In Washington, as in state legislatures around the country, we often see goofy bills and resolutions introduced, but most thankfully die without any action being taken. But what really got my attention was the news that the Tennessee Senate's State and Local Government Committee voted 7-1 last week to advance the bill. And, no, this isn't an April Fool's joke.
My second reaction was, why stop there? Why not just repeal the 17th Amendment to the Constitution and go back to the way things were before 1913 when voters had no say at all, and state legislatures elected U.S. senators? The 17th Amendment calls for the popular election of U.S. senators but is silent on nominations; indeed, the Constitution is silent on the whole issue of political parties.
As a result, states pretty much have a free hand in determining how nominees are selected. Utah has a two-step process whereby a candidate must clear a 60 percent threshold in the state convention to avoid a statewide primary election; if no candidate receives 60 percent of the vote, the top two candidates move on to a primary. In 2010, this process resulted in incumbent Republican Robert Bennett, one of the ablest U.S. senators to serve in a long time, not even making it onto a primary ballot. By most counts, Bennett would have easily won a primary, but in a Tea Party-packed convention process, he came up short -- his vote in favor of the Troubled Asset Relief Program was his biggest sin.
Virginia has an odd system in which the parties decide whether the state holds a convention or a primary each election cycle. Neither Utah nor Virginia has a process that should be emulated; indeed, with cynicism about government increasing, is this really a good time to cut voters out of the process? Why let state legislators choose who should be the Senate nominee?
The report is long on lists of ailments, but shorter on specific fixes. There are recommendations for better outreach and more focused efforts, but little discussion about the policies and specifics that the party would sell while reaching out to different types of voters.As Josh Putnam points out, the reports proposals for earlier primaries and regional primaries could require action by state legislatures and the cooperation of the Democratic National Committee. Moving primary dates is tricky because it forces states either to move primary dates for other offices or have separate presidential primaries, which is expensive.
Beyond immigration, it barely touches on policy. That was by design, according to the report, because it’s not the RNC’s purview. Still, policy is no small part of the GOP’s internal debate now, which underscores the limitations of what a party committee can do.
About one in five U.S. registered voters (21%) say most members of Congress deserve re-election, the lowest percentage Gallup has found in the 20-year history of asking this question. The prior lows of 28% were recorded in 2010 and earlier this year.
...
Voters are more charitable in their evaluations of their own member of Congress, with 54% saying he or she deserves re-election, compared with 57% in May. The electorate has consistently been more likely to say their member of Congress deserves re-election than to say most members do. However, even though a majority believes their own representative should be re-elected, the current percentage is on the low end of what Gallup has measured historically. The lowest readings were 48% in October 1992 and 49% on two occasions in 2010.
A record number of Californians chose a mailbox over a polling place when they voted in the June 5 Presidential Primary Election, as reported in the Statement of the Vote certified today by Secretary of State Debra Bowen.
The June 2012 vote-by-mail ratio of 65% topped the previous record set in the May 19, 2009, Statewide Special Election in which 62% of ballots were cast by mail.
Overall, 5,328,296 voters participated in the election, which is 31.1% of the total voters registered in the state. The lowest voter turnout for any statewide election in California was 28.2% in June 2008.
“Given the ease and convenience that voting by mail offers, it’s not surprising to see more and more people choose to cast their ballots from home,” said Secretary Bowen, California’s chief elections officer.
Counties with the highest voter turnout as a percentage of registered voters were Sierra (59.2%), Alpine (58.6%) and Amador (57.1%). Sierra and Alpine are the only California counties that conduct elections entirely by mail. Countywide turnout was lowest in Los Angeles (21.8%), San Bernardino (23.7%) and Orange (26.5%).
The certified election results, including county-by-county numbers and historical statistics on voter eligibility, registration and turnout, are available on the Secretary of State’s website at www.sos.ca.gov/elections/sov/2012-primary.
That Senator Richard G. Lugar was defeated for re-election in a Republican primary in Indiana yesterday wasn’t a surprise to anyone who had watched the tide turn against the 35-year senator in the past few weeks.
What was stunning was how thoroughly Lugar was defeated by state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who won by 61 percent to 39 percent.
Mourdock won 90 of Indiana’s 92 counties, taking more than two-thirds of the vote in 38 counties. Even in Marion County, where Lugar served as mayor of Indianapolis five decades ago, the senator won just 54 percent. The only other county Lugar won was Boone, an Indianapolis suburb.
The Times’ coverage of local politics has shrunk in recent years with the closing of the Metro section, but the paper’s ability to make or break candidates has grown. In conversations with nearly two dozen political operatives, office holders and candidates, the consensus was that The Times remains the biggest single factor in deciding who gets elected in this town. The paper’s imprimatur carries more weight than even the biggest unions. Pollsters estimate that a Times endorsement can boost a candidate anywhere between 5 and 20 points. Politicos say that it is worth the equivalent of out-raising your opponent by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“In Manhattan, I have colleagues who obsess over it,” said one City Councilman. “There are people here who, everything they do in public life, they gauge how The New York Times will react.”
There are, to be sure, local races in African-American or immigrant neighborhoods where getting The Times’ nod doesn’t much matter. But because of its sway in the whiter and more affluent parts of the city, which have the highest concentration of voters, the paper’s backing ends up being the primary factor in who gets elected to citywide and most boroughwide offices. And because Democratic primaries in New York State are so dominated by those voters—plus those in the affluent suburbs where the signature blue plastic bag is the must-have driveway accessory, the endorsement is the biggest prize for statewide races, too.
...
Back in the day, campaign staffers used to camp out at a newsstand across from the Times Building, or at another on Christopher Street where the first editions were plopped down at midnight. Today, the news comes via Google News alert on campaign blackberries, leading to virtual midnight celebrations.
But even still, the endorsement remains a vestige of an earlier era.
“When I was going to elementary school I was taught that if you don’t know who is running, you bring The New York Times into the voting booth with you and you vote that way,” said George Arzt, a local consultant also thought to carry great sway with the board. “There are a lot less publications than there were then, but they are still dominant.” [emphasis added]
Exit polls in four of the Super Tuesday states asked voters about their religious affiliation (Protestant, Catholic, etc.). Romney, Santorum and Gingrich each won the Protestant vote in one state, while Protestants were evenly divided between Romney and Santorum in the fourth (Ohio). Catholics preferred Romney in two states (Massachusetts and Ohio) and were evenly divided in Georgia (between Romney and Gingrich) and Tennessee (between Romney and Santorum). Santorum, who has been Romney’s closest competitor in recent primaries and who is Catholic himself, has yet to achieve an outright victory among Catholics in any state for which data are available.
Choosing a candidate in a party primary is fundamentally more complicated than in a general election, experts say.
Scholarly research into how voters choose a candidate in primaries is limited, compared with studies of voter behavior in the general election. But as major contests loom in Arizona and Michigan on Tuesday, with Super Tuesday following on March 6, experts agree that voting in primaries is a challenging task.
For starters, you can't simply vote your party. "People use party as a cue extensively in voting," says political scientist David Redlawsk of Rutgers University. It's "the simplest piece of information we normally have. ... Not having that party cue really makes it much more difficult for voters," including independents.
Other complications:
—There are more candidates to consider than just the two leading nominees in November.
—Voters know less about primary candidates than they'll hear later on about the eventual nominees.
—There are generally fewer differences among those candidates than a voter will see between a Republican and Democrat. People who spend a lot of time studying the policy differences "might in fact find themselves more confused than better informed," Redlawsk says.
As his Rutgers colleague Richard Lau sums up in an analysis of the 2008 nominating process, "Voting in primary elections is downright hard."