New Common Ground Democracy column with this subtitle: “Ohio’s U.S. Senate race this year, as in 2022, illustrates how the current electoral system causes the defeat of the candidate whom a majority of voters prefer to each other candidate in the race.”

Ohio is a state with a ballot initiative procedure. In fact, last year, voters rejected a proposal to make it significantly more difficult to adopt citizen-initiated constitutional amendments. Voters in the state should use this procedure to pursue Common Ground Democracy electoral reform. For reasons discussed in the column, and confirmed by this week’s result in the state’s GOP primary for the U.S. Senate seat, Ohio has become the kind of state that would especially benefit from a “Condorcet-consistent” electoral system: one in which the MAGA faction of the Republican party has become decisively dominant within the party, but is not a majority of the state’s entire electorate–while at the same time, the two factions of the GOP (its MAGA wing and its since-eclipsed traditional wing) combine to form a majority of the state’s voters, leaving Democrats in a clear minority among the voters of this now solidly red state. The existing electoral system will consistently cause the MAGA wing of Republicans to prevail in statewide elections even though a majority of voters statewide would consistently prefer the traditional wing of the GOP to prevail. If Democrats in the state are smart, they will join forces with what’s left of Ohio’s traditional wing of the GOP to adopt a Condorcet-consistent electoral system; Democrats aren’t going to win many statewide races under the current system, and so they might as well support a system that will better results from their perspective–more moderate Republicans–than the current one. And surely by now traditional Republicans in Ohio should realize that a Condorcet-consistent system is their only chance at electoral survival.

(Note: some typos have been corrected in the online version of the column, accessible with the link above; if you received a copy of the column by email earlier, and were planning to look at that version, you might prefer the corrected one online.)