To Work in Ohio, Alaska's "Final Four" Electoral System Needs Modification

Ohio's partisan polarization is so severe that stronger medicine than Alaska's new electoral reform is necessary to avoid the election of extreme candidates in the Buckeye State.

In my last Common Ground Democracy column, I wrote about how the result of the Republican primary for Ohio’s U.S. Senate election this year was further evidence of the need for electoral reform based on Common Ground Democracy principles.

It is worth exploring in more detail some of these points: (1) why Ohio needs Common Ground Democracy reform specifically, (2) why other types of reform wouldn’t work to ameliorate the degree of partisan polarization that currently afflicts Ohio, and thus (3) why Ohio is an especially good state to serve as a “laboratory of democracy” to test the efficacy of Common Ground Democracy reform as a remedy for acute partisan polarization.

Let’s start by considering Alaska’s new “final four” electoral system. It’s a good week to do that, given the NCAA basketball tournaments (women’s and men’s) underway.

Alaska’s system has two rounds. The first is a “nonpartisan primary” in which all the state’s voters choose among all the candidates running for the office in question, regardless of any affiliation with a political party either the voters or candidates may have. A candidate can choose whether or not to be identified on the primary ballot as affiliated with a political party, and whether or not a voter is a member of a political party is irrelevant to the voter’s right to cast a ballot in the primary.

Some scholars have questioned whether calling this first round of Alaska’s system a “nonpartisan primary” is the best way to describe it, given that the term “primary” is usually associated specifically with elections that determine a political party’s nominee. The phrase “all-comers preliminary” has been offered as an alternative. But Alaska itself calls the first round of its system a “nonpartisan primary,” and so I will use that term here.

In this nonpartisan primary, voters select the single candidate they wish to advance to the general election. The four candidates who receive the most votes in the primary are the ones who advance to the general election. This is why the Alaska system has been given the “top four” or “final four” moniker.

In the general election, Alaska uses a version of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) to determine which of the four finalists is the single candidate to win the office at stake. In any RCV election, voters receive a ballot that permits them to rank the candidates in order of preference. Different versions of RCV determine the single winner of the election using different computational methods. The particular version of RCV that Alaska uses computes the winner by eliminating one-by-one the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes on all the RCV ballots and then redistributing the ballots that ranked the eliminated candidate first to whichever candidate is ranked next on each of those ballots. After all other candidates are eliminated, the last remaining candidate is elected. For sake of efficiency, and without any difference in results, whenever any candidate has a majority of first-place votes, the Alaska system declares that candidate the winner without bothering to conduct the elimination-and-redistribution procedure, because doing so would only keep that same candidate as the winner. (When more than one candidate remains uneliminated, if one of those candidates already has a majority of first-choice votes, it is necessarily true than any other candidate has fewer first-place votes and thus would be eliminated before the candidate having a majority of first-place votes.)

In 2022, the first year of its implementation, the Alaska system had notable success in avoiding the election of more extreme candidates. In the state’s U.S. Senate election that year, incumbent Lisa Murkowski was one of the top four finishers in the nonpartisan primary and went on to win the RCV general election against, among the other candidates, an election denialist endorsed by Donald Trump. If Alaska had retained its previous electoral system—the same kind used by most other states, consisting of partisan primaries followed by a plurality-winner general election (in which the candidate with the most votes wins, regardless of whether or not they have a majority)—then it's almost certain that the Trump-endorsed election denialist would have defeated Murkowski in the Republican primary and gone on to win the general election. (The degree of additional polarization of the electorate in the dozen years between 2010 and 2022 would have made it highly unlikely that Murkowski could have repeated her 2010 feat of winning the general election as a write-in candidate after having lost the Republican primary.)

There were similar stories in other 2022 Alaska races. One key state senate election was won by Cathy Giessel, a moderate Republican who defeated a more extreme candidate, Roger Holland, who had defeated her two years earlier in the GOP primary. As a result, some scholars and policy analysts are recommending that other states adopt Alaska’s system as a way to counteract polarization and extremism in those states as well.

Indeed, in January 2021, three weeks after the insurrection at the Capitol over the counting of the electoral votes that determined Joe Biden’s victory—and Donald Trump’s defeat—Ohio’s U.S. Senator Rob Portman announced that he wasn’t running for reelection. At the time, I thought that Alaska’s new system might be just what Ohio needed. Portman’s retirement was a shock because he was relatively young, an effective legislator, and broadly popular with Ohio’s electorate. But Portman was not a MAGA Republican devoted to Trump. And given Trump’s 8-point victories in Ohio in both 2016 and 2020, it was clear that Portman would have to transform himself into a Trump follower if he were to win the Republican primary in 2022 as the first step to retaining his Senate seat in the general election. There’s no doubt that Portman would easily win reelection in November 2022 given his popularity with Ohio’s voters, if only he could make it to the general election by being renominated by his own party. But because the party had become dominated by Trump and his MAGA supporters, prevailing in his own party’s primary was now a formidable barrier unless Portman changed his character and began kowtowing to Trump—something he was apparently unwilling to do.

I started calling the structural obstacle that the partisan primary presented to a moderate Republican popular with a state’s general election voters “the Portman problem,” and I hoped that Alaska’s new electoral system would be an easily replicable “off the shelf” solution to this problem.

But, as I spent more time analyzing how Alaska’s system likely would apply in Ohio, I realized it would not work in the same way that it does in Alaska itself. Alaska has a weak Democratic party, which means that often the top two candidates in an Alaska election will both be Republicans, one more moderate than the other. With the Democrat coming in third, trailing the two Republicans, Alaska’s version of RCV favors the more moderate Republican, who will tend to pick up the second-choice votes of the eliminated Democrat. (The fourth candidate, eliminated even earlier than the Democrat and with even fewer first-place votes to redistribute to other candidates, is often inconsequential.)

Ohio, however, has a relatively strong Democratic party—not strong enough to win most statewide elections in this increasingly red, rather than purple, state; but still strong enough to come in second, usually behind a MAGA-style Republican who comes in first. This one-two finish by the MAGA Republican and the Democrat pushes the moderate Republican into third place. This means that in the Alaska system, the moderate Republican will be eliminated, leaving the election to end up between the MAGA Republican and the Democrat, with the MAGA Republican likely to win. In Ohio, unlike Alaska, the Alaska system is unlikely to produce results any different than the existing electoral system of partisan primaries followed by a plurality-winner general election.

Ohio’s U.S. Senate elections in both 2022 and this year confirm this initial analysis. Although Ohio has used its existing electoral system for both races, it is possible to identify who would have been the top four candidates each time if Ohio had adopted Alaska’s system. To do this, one simply identifies the four candidates who received the most votes in either of the two major-party primaries. (It is conceivable, of course, that one or more of the top four voter-getters might have been different if all the candidates had been running against each other in a nonpartisan primary—mostly because turnout for a nonpartisan primary might have included more moderate voters than the combined turnout for the two separate major-party primaries—but this method is a good enough approximation of who the top four candidates in a nonpartisan primary would have been, and the best that can be done given the existing system.) In 2022, the top four candidates would have been:

1.    Tim Ryan, the Democrat;

2.    J.D. Vance, the Trump-endorsed MAGA candidate;

3.    Josh Mandel, another MAGA candidate who sought Trump’s endorsement;

4.    Matt Dolan, a non-MAGA moderate Republican.

In 2024, the top four candidates would have been:

1.    Sherrod Brown, the Democrat;

2.    Bernie Moreno, the Trump-endorsed MAGA candidate;

3.    Frank LaRose, another MAGA candidate who sought Trump’s endorsement;

4.    Matt Dolan, still a non-MAGA moderate Republican.

If Ohio used Alaska’s version of RCV to elect a single winner among the top four candidates, in both years the first two candidates to be eliminated would have been Matt Dolan and the MAGA candidate who failed to get Trump’s endorsement. Thus, in both years, the Alaska-style RCV election would come down to a head-to-head contest between the Democrat and the Trump-endorsed MAGA candidate. In 2022, J.D. Vance would have won this head-to-head contest against Tim Ryan, just as he did with Ohio’s existing electoral system in place. In 2024, it remains unclear whether Sherrod Brown or Bernie Moreno will win in November.

But one thing is certain from this analysis: a moderate Republican in the mold of Rob Portman, like Matt Dolan, cannot prevail in Ohio using Alaska’s electoral system. This is true even when the moderate Republican, like Portman himself, is the candidate most preferred by a majority of the state’s voters when compared to each other candidate in the race. In 2022, there is no doubt that a majority of Ohio’s voters would have preferred Portman to either Tim Ryan or J.D. Vance. Indeed, there’s no doubt that a majority of Ohio’s voters would have preferred Portman to any of the top four candidates who actually ran that year. But Ohio’s existing electoral system would not let a majority of voters express this preference for Portman. That’s the essence of the “Portman problem.” And the key point here is that in Ohio Alaska’s system would produce the same “Portman problem” as Ohio’s existing electoral system.

To solve “the Portman problem” in Ohio, it is necessary for the state to adopt an electoral system based on Common Ground Democracy principles. It is possible, moreover, to modify the Alaska system so that it complies with Common Ground Democracy principles. All it takes is to tweak the mathematical method for identifying the winner from the RCV ballots. The nonpartisan primary can still be the same, and it can still yield four candidates who advance to the general election. The voters in the general election can still cast the same RCV ballots, ranking the four candidates in order of preference. The only difference is the computational procedure that determines the winner from the RCV ballots.

To comply with Common Ground Democracy principles, the modified version of Alaska’s system would conduct a round-robin tournament among the four candidates on the RCV ballot. In a round-robin tournament, every candidate faces each other candidate in a direct head-to-head competition. The RCV ballot enables a direct head-to-head comparison between each pair of candidates: for each pair, one candidate will be ranked higher than the other on each ballot. Thus, for each pair of candidates, it is possible to compute which of the two a majority of voters prefer.

In an election conducted according to Common Ground Democracy principles, a candidate whom a majority of voters prefers compared to each other candidate on the ballot will be declared the winner. In 2022, as already discussed, a majority of voters would have preferred Portman to each other candidate on the ballot. Thus, if Ohio had used a modified version of Alaska’s system that complied with Common Ground Democracy principles, and if Portman had chosen to run in that election, Portman would have won. Common Ground Democracy, in other words, solves “the Portman problem” for Ohio.

Systematic analysis based on computer-simulated elections bears this out. My colleagues Nathan Atkinson, Scott Ganz, and John Mantus have conducted 100,000 computer-simulated elections for Ohio using both Alaska’s system and a round-robin variant of the Alaska system. These computer-simulation elections were based on a profile of Ohio’s electorate derived from available survey data.

As expected, this profile shows Ohio’s electorate to be highly polarized, but with somewhat more voters on the right side of the partisan spectrum than on the left:

Given this electorate, 100,000 elections using Alaska’s system produces very few winners on the left, with most winners distinctly on the right side of the spectrum:

Alaska’s Electoral System in Ohio:

The average distance of these 100,000 winners from the electorate’s median voter, measured by degree of partisanship one way or the other (using absolute values), is 0.1969—a numerical confirmation that the Alaska system produces winners almost as highly polarized as the electorate itself. Indeed, in these 100,000 computer-simulated elections using Alaska’s system in Ohio, there are virtually no winners whose position on the partisanship spectrum corresponds to the electorate’s median voter. Instead, most of the winners are much further to the right of the median voter, with a very few winners considerably to the left of the median voter.

By contrast, in the 100,000 computer-simulated elections using the round-robin variant of Alaska’s system for the same Ohio electorate, the winners are clustered much closer to the median voter:

Round-Robin Variant of Alaska’s System in Ohio

There is no gap between the winners on the left and those on the right, as there is with Alaska system’s 100,000 elections. Moreover, the average distance of the 100,000 round-robin winners from Ohio’s median voter is only 0.1013—a much lower number than the corresponding figure for the Alaska system, thereby confirming that the round-robin system is able to counteract polarization and thus solve the “Portman problem” in a way that the Alaska system cannot.

The implication of all this should be abundantly clear: if the goal is for Ohio’s elections to yield winning candidates who most closely correspond to the preferences of a majority of the state’s voters—and for purposes of this particular Common Ground Democracy essay, we can assume that this should be the goal—then Ohio should not adopt an unmodified version of Alaska’s system, but instead should adopt a variation that includes the round-robin method of determining the winner from the RCV ballots.

To be clear, Ohio doesn’t need to use RCV ballots in order to have an electoral system that complies with Common Ground Democracy principles. Instead, as I’ve explained previously, Ohio could adopt a “Top-3” system that starts with the same kind of nonpartisan primary that Alaska uses but instead of advancing four candidates to the general election advances only three. Then, in the general election, instead of using RCV ballots, the Top-3 system would conduct a direct round-robin competition among the three candidates: A versus B, B versus C, A versus C. Whichever candidate wins both round-robin matches against their two opponents would win the Top-3 election.

This kind of Top-3 system is well-suited to solving the “Portman problem” in Ohio. It gives moderate Republicans like Rob Portman himself, or Matt Dolan, the chance to compete one-on-one against both MAGA Republicans and Democrats separately, so that these moderate Republicans can show that a majority of the state’s voters prefer them to either alternative on their right or left.  Also, employing a Top-3 system in Ohio would give political chameleons like Frank LaRose or, before him, J.D. Vance—both of whom changed from anti-Trump Republicans to Trump-praising sycophants—an incentive to moderate their positions in order to appeal to the state’s median voter.  And it would be easier for election officials to administer, and for voters to understand, a Top-3 system rather than any form of a “final four” system that uses RCV.

Still, there are reasons why one might prefer a “final four” system notwithstanding its downsides. For one thing, giving general election voters a choice among four candidates rather than three increases their options by 33%. There is thus a greater chance of a true common-ground candidate emerging among four alternatives instead of three. Moreover, given the existence of Alaska’s “final four” system—and thus some familiarity among election officials and the public with how it operates—it is natural to want to pursue reform for Ohio along similar lines rather than reinventing the wheel more than necessary.

But if election reformers in Ohio want to pursue a “final four” system modeled on Alaska’s, they need to use a version of RCV tabulation consistent with Common Ground Democracy principles—like the round-robin method described above—rather than the RCV tabulation method that Alaska uses.

There is no point undertaking the arduous effort for electoral reform in Ohio, presumably by means of a ballot initiative campaign (like the one currently underway for redistricting reform in the state), only to have the reform end up ineffectual because reformers did not take account of the significant difference between the electorates of Alaska and Ohio and the implications of this difference for the use of Alaska’s specific RCV tabulation method in Ohio. The same type of computer-simulated elections that confirms the need for round-robin RCV tabulation in Ohio also confirms that Alaska’s tabulation works adequately for Alaska given the different profile of its electorate. The winners of 100,000 elections in Alaska using the state’s own RCV tabulation method are much closer to the state’s median voter than the winners of 100,000 elections in Ohio using Alaska’s tabulation method:

Alaska’s Electoral System in Alaska

For Alaska, there is no gap of the kind for Ohio, which plunges essentially to zero the number of winners who are positioned close to the state’s median voter:

Alaska’s Electoral System in Ohio [same as above]:

The numbers tell the same story. Whereas the average distance of the 100,000 winners in Ohio from the state’s median voter is 0.1969, the same figure for Alaska is much smaller: only 0.1347.  This shows that Alaska’s specific system can work for Alaska, but Ohio needs the extra benefit of the round-robin tabulation method.

In sum, the idea of pursuing electoral reform in Ohio to solve “the Portman problem” is a good, even important, one. There is a pressing need in Ohio to replace the existing system of partisan primaries and a plurality-winner general election with a nonpartisan primary of the kind that exists in Alaska, followed by a general election among a set of candidates who advance from the primary based on the votes they get there. And pursuing this kind of reform by means of a ballot initiative campaign is the way to maximize the chance of getting the reform adopted, as the state’s legislature unfortunately cannot be relied upon to enact nonpartisan electoral reform in the public interest.

But getting right the details of a reform proposal to put on the ballot is key. This means making sure that the reform proposal is consistent with Common Ground Democracy principles. At the very least, reformers in Ohio should emulate their counterparts in Arizona and pursue a ballot initiative that is agnostic on what particular RCV tabulation method is adopted, rather than enshrining into Ohio’s constitution a specific RCV tabulation method that will do the state little or no good.

The stakes are too high to make a mistake on what version of electoral reform would be successful in redressing Ohio’s severe partisan polarization.