Rick Pildes on the important electoral reform initiatives on the ballot

This year is the most significant one in memory in terms of potential electoral reform by citizen initiatives.

For those of you who have access to the New York Times, I urge you to read a superb opinion essay by Rick Pildes, whose work on electoral reform I’ve highlighted previously here at Common Ground Democracy. In his essay, Rick discusses the electoral reform measures on the ballots in eight states and explains their importance. As he says, “These proposals are intended to make the political system more responsive to the preferences of a majority of voters, rather than continuing a system that has become easy prey for factional minorities.”

What these reforms have in common is, as Rick details, is their replacement of traditional partisan primaries with nonpartisan preliminary elections—call them nonpartisan primaries, if you want—in which all candidates from all parties, as well as independent candidates, run against each other in order to advance to the November general election. This change is hugely consequential because it prevents partisan primaries from eliminating candidates who would be more preferable to the general election’s voters. As Rick puts the point, this change “ensures that candidates who would have significant appeal in the general election are not prematurely eliminated at the early, primary stage.”

The reforms differ in how they would handle the general election. In Colorado and Idaho, the reform would replicate Alaska’s “Top Four” system, in which four candidates from the nonpartisan primary advance to the general election, where the “instant runoff” form of Ranked Choice Voting is used to determine the winner. In Alaska, voters are being asked to repeal this system even though it was used for the first time only two years ago. In Nevada, the reform is a “Final Five” variation of the Alaska’s system, where five candidates rather than four make it to the general election that uses the same “instant runoff” procedure to choose the winner. (Nevada’s voters approved this reform once already, but the state’s constitution requires them to approve it again in order for it to take effect.)

In a previous Common Ground Democracy essay, I singled out Arizona’s proposed reform as especially worthwhile because of its flexibility. While requiring nonpartisan primaries—and thus achieving what Rick identifies as most important—it leaves to the state’s legislature (or the Secretary of State if the legislature doesn’t act) whether only two candidates advance to the general election, as in California (or South Dakota, if it adopts that version of the reform this year), or instead more than two candidates advance, in which case some form of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) must be used to pick the winner. But under the Arizona proposal, it could be four, five or some other number of candidates on the general election RCV ballot. More importantly, the Arizona proposal doesn’t specify the tabulation method used to identify the election’s winner from the RCV ballot: it could be the “instant runoff” method used in Alaska and, potentially Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada, or it could be one of the Convergence Voting methods (derived from Condorcet’s early exploration of these methods) that I’ve described in previous Common Ground Democracy essays. Because Convergence Voting has a greater capacity to counteract polarization, the ability to implement a form of RCV with a Convergence Voting tabulation method would be especially beneficial for a highly polarized state like Arizona.

Montana also has a flexible—and thus valuable—version of electoral reform on its ballot this year. One of the two proposals on the ballot would simply adopt a majority-winner requirement for elections in the state, leaving it to the legislature to determine how to implement the majority-winner requirement. (The other proposal would require a “Top Four” nonpartisan primary.) This simple majority-winner proposal is something that I’ve advocated previously for congressional elections. It’s what most Americans expect elections to be (it should be necessary to receive a majority of votes in order to win), but most American elections are actually governed by a plurality-winner rule, and that makes a huge difference. If a majority-winner requirement is added to Montana’s constitution, then there would need to be a runoff, an instant runoff, Convergence Voting, or some other electoral method of making sure that the winner received more than 50%.

Thus, as Rick’s essay advises, when you watch the election returns next Tuesday, in addition to the inevitable focus on the presidential race, as well as to looking for results in congressional and other races, pay attention to the fate of these electoral reform measures. If they pass, they can (in Rick’s words) “start to diminish some of the forces that are leaving so many Americans alienated from the democratic process.”