A former Republican voter appears to have defeated Democrat Mondaire Jones in the left-wing Working Families Party’s primary for New York’s 17th Congressional District.
As of 8:55 a.m. ET on Wednesday, ex-GOP backer Anthony Frascone led Jones 244 votes to 183, with 92 percent of votes counted. Frascone’s lead of 61 is larger than the number of votes yet to be counted, meaning he has defeated Jones. Between 2021 and 2023, Jones served as representative for New York’s 17th district but lost his seat to Republican Mike Lawler in November 2022….
Category Archives: alternative voting systems
“The Ballot Measures Aim to Reduce Partisanship. Can They Fix American Politics?”
Michael Wines for the NYT:
Americans of both parties routinely express deep concern about the state of the country’s democracy. This fall, many voters may have a chance to do something about it, by voting on state ballot measures related to the nuts and bolts of elections and governance.
Eight states, including Ohio and seven others largely in the West, appear all but certain to field ballot measures that would either overhaul redistricting or rewrite election rules to discourage hyper-partisanship and give voters a greater voice in choosing candidates.
Redistricting ballot measures are not uncommon, but since the advent of citizen-backed ballot initiatives in the early 1900s no other year has had more than three election-system initiatives, according to the online elections database Ballotpedia….
Closed primaries, the argument goes, rob independent voters — a growing segment of the electorate, and in some states now the largest one — of a voice in choosing general election candidates. Candidates in open primaries have an incentive to court not only independents but also voters of the opposing party, which, in theory at least, should steer them closer to the political center.
And gerrymandered maps make elections so lopsided that parties with little chance of winning often don’t bother to field general-election candidates. (Nationally, about four in 10 state legislative races have only one candidate.) In those cases, the general election winner only has to win over primary voters, not the broader electorate that turns out in November.
Advocates of ranked-choice elections say they not only give voters a greater say in choosing the ultimate winner of a political contest, but also reward candidates who try to win over a broad swath of the electorate.
It is no accident that electing more moderates would change the conditions that have made the G.O.P. a hothouse for far-right extremists, said Richard L. Hasen, an election-law expert and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law.
“So much of this has to do with the battle for the soul of the Republican Party,” he said.
Not everyone buys the logic. Academic research suggests that ending gerrymandering and adopting certain versions of ranked-choice voting can indeed dampen hyper-partisanship and promote cooperation. But the evidence favoring open primaries is more mixed….
However laudable, many experts and activists say that the proposed fixes are weak medicine to cure what ails American democracy.
“Everyone agrees that our political system is dysfunctional,” said Nate Persily, a leading expert on voting and democracy at Stanford Law School. “But this is not a particularly effective way to deal with our hair-on-fire moment. When insurrectionists are breaking down the Capitol doors, there’s only so much that changing primary election rules is going to do.”…
Ned Foley responds to Nate’s comments here.
“Ranked-Choice Voting Draws Bipartisan Ire”
In an era warped by extreme partisan discord, ranked-choice voting has managed to unsettle Republican and Democratic politicians alike. Long fearful of African American voter strength and cross-racial coalitions that sometimes spring up, many white Republican political power brokers in the South have been strategizing to eliminate an option like RCV before it can garner an iota of interest or support.
Republicans can point to losses from the RCV system. Only Alaska and Maine use RCV in state and federal elections (Hawaii also uses RCV in certain statewide races). In Maine, Jared Golden earned his 2018 swing-seat victory in Congress after an instant runoff put him over the top against Republican Bruce Poliquin, the incumbent congressman, who led after the first round.
RCV opponents in Alaska have launched a repeal campaign after Rep. Mary Sattler Peltola fended off 12 candidates, including former Republican governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, after three rounds of balloting in 2022 for the state’s sole congressional seat. The 2024 initiative proposes a return to a traditional partisan primary system and will appear on the November ballot.
A Rolling Stone/Documented investigation found that far-right groups have poured millions into a coordinated campaign to destabilize RCV, principally because the mechanism gives voters more choices—and when they have choices, they have the opportunity to select less polarizing candidates. The Republican National Committee officially declared its opposition to ranked-choice voting in 2023. The party claimed that the mechanism makes voting too complex and time-consuming, leading to “ballot exhaustion” and other euphemisms that would make George Orwell seize up.’Some longtime Democratic incumbents are also keen to shut down threats to their power. The District of Columbia Democratic Party has opposed a ballot initiative, currently in the signature-gathering phase, that would institute RCV for the city elections. Now in her third term, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser has called RCV “a bad idea.”…
Rick Hasen, a UCLA professor of law and political science who specializes in election law, told the Prospect that RCV is “better understood as a fear of moderate candidates being elected to office.” He adds, “If you think about places like Alabama and Mississippi, they’ve got Republican majorities, but they’ve got a fairly sizable Black population that hasn’t been able to get its fair share of political power. Maybe moving toward ranked-choice voting could [create] coalitions that could produce some more moderate Republicans.”
“What Is ‘Fusion Voting’? Just a Way to Save the Country, That’s All”
Daniel Cantor and Bill Kristol in The New Republic.
“What Is “Fusion Voting”? Just a Way to Save the Country, That’s All”
Dan Cantor and Bill Kristol ask:
What in the world could possibly bring the two of us together? One of us is a slightly reformed Reaganite, the other a slightly chastened social democrat, each of us mugged by authoritarianism. In the 1980s and 1990s, one of us worked for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush; the other worked in the presidential campaigns of the Reverend Jesse Jackson Jr. and co-founded a progressive third party.
And yet, here we are, collaborating on a project that we believe can help restore the political health of the country we both love.
Ranked-choice roundup
David Daley on ranked-choice voting and the spoiler effect.
Pluribus News looks at the states looking toward ranked-choice and the states turning away – and the municipalities using ranked-choice that may be raising the prominence of both conversations. (UPDATE: Fox News also joins the chat.)
Steven Hill on who likes and who doesn’t like the Alaska version of RCV.
And an interesting new paper on ranked choice voting and turnout:
Many jurisdictions in the United States have recently adopted single-winner ranked choice voting (RCV) to replace first-past-the-post plurality elections. This study contributes to the literature examining the potential consequences of changing to RCV by modeling the relationship between electoral systems and voter turnout. We propose that RCV may increase turnout by incentivizing increased contacts with voters. Previous attempts at assessing the relationship between RCV and turnout in the US have been limited by a lack of individual-level turnout data measured across all cases where RCV is and is not used. The study utilizes large, unique data from administrative voter turnout records that overcomes this limitation. We find significant and substantially higher probabilities of turnout in places that use RCV, and find evidence that campaigns in RCV places have greater incidences of direct voter contacting than in similar places that do not use RCV.
“One of the biggest changes ever proposed for Colorado elections is on a journey to this November’s ballot”
Colorado Public Radio with more on the proposed initiative to implement a top-four primary with ranked-choice voting for the general election.
Meanwhile, there’s a signature campaign in Maine to get two initiatives on the ballot: voter ID and a repeal of participation in the national popular vote compact.
And don’t forget Arizona’s ballot measure to make ballot measures impracticable.
“Imagine if Congress was elected by Proportional Representation”
A number of US cities and towns – from New York City, Cincinnati and Cleveland to Chilton County AL and a number of counties in Pennsylvania — have had a history of electing their city councils or county governments by one of several proportional representation electoral methods. But only one US state, as far as I know, has ever used a proportional method to elect its legislature. That’s the state of Illinois.
For 110 years until 1980, Illinois used a method called cumulative voting to elect its state House of Representatives. Instead of single-seat “winner take all” districts, in which legislators were elected one district at a time, cumulative voting in Illinois used three-seat districts, and a candidate needed only 25% of the popular vote to win one of the three seats. Cumulative voting, which is known as a “semi-proportional” voting method, is designed to foster broad representation, more voter choice and less bitter partisanship. Illinois’ experience with this method has a lot to teach us about how to address the severe crisis of American democracy….
“‘Deceptive’ MO ballot question bans non-U.S. citizens from voting. It’s already illegal”
When Missouri voters head to the ballot box this year, they’ll be asked to sign off on a measure that would ban ranked-choice voting or ranking candidates by preference.
But the first bullet point that will appear on the ballot question has nothing to do with that issue. It instead will ask Missourians whether to ban non-U.S. citizens from voting in the state, a practice that is already illegal. Disputes among lawmakers over whether to include a ban on non-citizen voting ultimately tanked a separate measure to weaken direct democracy. It was a key win for Democrats, who argued Republicans were using the non-citizen language as a way to deceive voters.
However, Missouri voters will still see similar language on the ballot this year. House Republicans, in the waning hours of the legislative session, passed a measure that included a ban on non-citizen voting attached to the ballot question that would outlaw ranked-choice voting.
“Can Proportional Representation Create Better Governance?”
John Carey & Oscar Pocasangre have this new paper at Protect Democracy.
“The failure of America’s geographic-based Winner Take All system”
Steven Hill at Democracy SOS.
“The impact of voter confusion in ranked choice voting”
Lonna Rae Atkeson, Eli McKown-Dawson, Jack Santucci, and Kyle L. Saunders in Social Science Quarterly. Abstract:
Objectives
Election observers have expressed concerns about voter “confusion” under ranked choice voting (RCV) since the 1890s. What is the meaning of “confusing,” and how does it affect behavior? We argue (with much of the literature) that ranking candidates for public office is a cognitively complex task because of a lack of information.
Methods
We explore some observable implications of this perspective using exit poll data from the first RCV election in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2018.
Results
Sixteen percent of voters reported having felt very (6 percent) or somewhat (10 percent) confused, and Hispanic voters were more likely to be confused than white voters. Confused voters report ranking fewer candidates, have lower confidence in ballot-counting accuracy, and are less supportive of RCV than nonconfused voters.
Conclusions
These results raise questions about RCV’s equity, participation costs for voters, ease of use, and longevity.
“How a new way of electing the House can change our politics”
Drew Penrose and David Daley oped:
The most meaningful change would put an end to winner-take-all, single-member districts and create a proportional House with larger, multimember districts and proportional voting. This might sound like a big lift, but it’s fully constitutional, deeply aligned with our founding vision, and only requires Congress to pass a statute. For example, the Fair Representation Act, a bill to be reintroduced in Congress this week by Reps. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), would do just that by requiring every state to replace its winner-take-all elections with proportional ranked-choice voting.
The advantages of a proportional system would be dramatic and immediate. It would make every contest competitive in every state. It would end gerrymandering and more fully represent the breadth of ideas held by voters. It would greatly expand opportunities for communities of color to build power. And it would create incentives for legislators to work productively in service of the public interest rather than to obstruct and demean their opponents.
Single-member, winner-take-all robs us of the diversity of ideas and interests that exist across all regions of the country. Massachusetts, for example, is a blue state. In 2020, all nine of its congressional districts were safely Democratic. Yet across those districts, 1.2 million people backed Donald Trump for president. Likewise, the band of states running up the center of the country, consisting of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas, elected a combined 14 representatives, 13 of whom were Republicans. Yet across those 13 Republican districts, 1.5 million people wanted Joe Biden to be president.
“Ranked-Choice Voting is MAGA’s Latest Target; Leonard Leo and other far-right power players are attacking a bipartisan election reform.”
Brendan Fischer writes for Documented (here’s the version at Rolling Stone):
An organized and well-funded network of right-wing groups is spending countless millions attacking a bipartisan election reform that could threaten the MAGA political project.
Ranked-choice voting — which allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference, rather than just selecting one — has been used in state and federal elections in Alaska and Maine, and has been gaining momentum in dozens of other states and municipalities, often with bipartisan support. Voters in Nevada and Oregon will hold referendums on adopting the system in 2024, and several other state and local governments have also been considering ranked-choice voting measures.
But beginning in early 2022, and intensifying in 2023, a range of so-called “election integrity” groups, from Leonard Leo’s Honest Elections Project to Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, have made stopping ranked-choice voting a top legislative priority.
Five states have since banned any city or county government from adopting the system, and at least six other states are considering similar measures this year. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) approved a model bill banning ranked-choice voting last year, a Turning Point Action official successfully pressed the Republican National Committee to adopt a resolution opposing the practice, and the Heritage Foundation has organized grassroots activists to oppose ranked choice voting in several states.
The far-right fixation on ranked-choice voting “is a bit bizarre,” said Rick Hasen, a professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA’s Law School. “It’s not really an issue of ‘honest elections’ or ‘election integrity,’” he said. “It’s a debate about the best way to translate voters’ preferences into election winners.”
“I would guess,” Hasen said, “that the reason for the fear of ranked choice voting is that it could help elect more Republican moderates rather than more extreme Republicans.”
Ranked choice voting is one of the few — if not the only — democracy reforms that still has bipartisan support. For example, 21 cities in deep-red Utah use ranked choice voting, where it is broadly popular, and bills to implement it have attracted Republican co-sponsors in states like Wisconsin, Virginia, and Georgia. The organized attacks on ranked choice voting appear aimed at eroding support for the reform among Republican lawmakers and conservative activists.
Groups backed by right-wing activist Leonard Leo are playing an outsized role in the campaign against ranked choice voting. Leo, who served as former President Donald Trump’s judicial adviser, helped construct the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority. In 2021, he was put in control of a $1.6 billion dark money fund to help push U.S. politics to the right.
While Leo’s relationship with Trump has frayed — he reportedly considered boosting another MAGA-aligned candidate, Ron DeSantis, in the GOP presidential primary — the success of his political project relies on electing far-right candidates under the same system that produced Trump….