Protect Democracy’s Ben Raderstorf and FairVote’s Mike Parsons have written this piece on the lessons that today’s reformers can learn from the wave of electoral systems reform that swept through American cities between 1915 and 1950, when many cities adopted and repealed PR.

Read the whole thing! But here are some excerpts on the lessons one can learn from :

So four lessons from this historical debate to take forward:

One: Focus on the end goals — pluralism and representation

Every reform is an instrument to an outcome, not an end in itself. Even as we argue and debate and experiment, let’s not miss the forest for the trees. American democracy is under threat because a calcified two-party system supported by winner-take-all elections are advantaging extremists and has put an unpopular autocrat back in the White House.

Two: Stay experimental

Because we don’t know exactly how different reforms will interact with the particular idiosyncrasies of American politics, we should be building a diverse portfolio of reform efforts with a reasonable degree of experimentation among proven systems as an explicit goal. Over-investment in any specific reform strategy, be it party-list or STV or otherwise, risks catastrophe if the bet goes bad. Alternatively, every reform that tries something slightly different gives us more data about how proportional representation works in the real, 21st-century United States.

Three: Find ways to channel — not resist — parties and factions

Political scientists almost unanimously agree that political parties are a necessary feature of a healthy democracy, as much as many Americans dislike them (the parties, we mean, not the political scientists). They’re the basic organizing function that keeps politics from descending into chaos. So one key question for reformers is this: How can we tap into widespread frustration with the parties as they are today to enact reform while proposing ways to help them function better in the future to sustain reform? Party-list advocates can learn from the adoptions of the Progressive Era just as STV advocates can learn from the repeals.

Four: Beware the election reformer’s dilemma

Finally, regardless of what happened back in the early 20th century, it’s worth approaching reform with a degree of humility regarding what will work, what won’t, and why. This is in part due to “the election reformer’s dilemma”:

The people who are most excited about electoral reform at the outset often approach politics from a different perspective from the voters the reform is intended to serve.

Almost by definition, those of us who are excited about electoral reform on its own merits are not anywhere close to the average voter. Election reformers tend to be far more politically engaged than the majority of the electorate. Many have more free time to engage in politics, or even count reform or politics as a full-time job. Some of us may follow the latest research produced by political scientists (or be political scientists ourselves). And some of us may be personally willing — even excited — to vote in multiple elections a year and have fairly detailed preferences and political views, including on individual candidates, ballot issues and so on.

From the Democracy Docket, we get this warning on the SAVE Act. The Save Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act) would require voters to provide proof of citizenship when they are registering to vote in federal elections.

According to the Democracy Docket:

The SAVE Act has stalled in the Senate since April, but a group of influential right-wing activists have hatched a plan to get it to President Donald Trump’s desk. 

Tea Party Patriots, the political arm of the long-running Tea Party movement, is launching a campaign aimed at pressuring lawmakers to prioritize the bill, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. 

Voting rights advocates warn the legislation could disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans, particularly women, young voters, low-income people and naturalized citizens.

The Brennan Center has conducted this analysis, concluding that at least $1.9 billion was spent on online ads in the 2024 election.

From the report:

Political advertisers spent $1.9 billion on online ads for the 2024 election on the four largest digital platforms (Meta, Google, Snap, and X) that publish analyzable spending data, according to a new analysis by the Brennan Center, OpenSecrets, and Wesleyan Media Project. Although this is the most complete accounting of online spending to influence the 2024 elections to date, it is an underestimate since no law requires platforms to publish information about political spending. Some platforms publish no data on this, and the voluntary disclosures of others are unstandardized and likely incomplete.

Our new examination of political ad content in the general election period expands on our summer 2024 and postelection analyses of online ad spending, identifying significant differences in the strategies used by spenders. Parties and outside groups were much more likely than candidates to use negative ads, and their ads focused largely on persuading voters. Candidates’ advertising goals, by contrast, tended to be evenly split between persuading voters and fundraising.

Some ELB readers might find this part of the report of particular interest:

There were partisan differences, too: While both sides of the aisle spent on efforts to persuade voters, spending in favor of Democrats was more likely to have fundraising as a goal, and spending in favor of Republicans was more likely to include get-out-the-vote efforts. Additionally, pro-Democratic spenders put a somewhat greater portion of ad money toward contrasting their party’s candidates with their opponents compared with pro-Republican spenders, who spent more on simply promoting their own candidates.

The prospect of a new political party by Elon Musk is garnering considerable attention. The question for me is whether the focus on third parties will also begin to undermine the American aversion to proportional representation. Ross Douthat has some advice for Musk here. Nate Cohn weighs in here and here. Alexander Burns explains how Musk could succeed. N.Y Times journalists Reid Epstein and Theodore Shleifer outline some of the difficulties that a potential new party would face.

From the article:

Congressional candidates for a theoretical new party face a labyrinthine system of signature requirements that vary from state to state. The most restrictive laws are in Georgia, where candidates outside the two major parties must gather 27,000 signatures from their district. This hurdle has kept third-party congressional candidates from being on a general election ballot since the law was enacted in 1943, according to Richard Winger, the publisher of Ballot Access News, which has tracked election laws since 1985.

They quote this ELB post by Derek Muller.

Even the name America Party could trip up Mr. Musk. New York State, for instance, has a law that forbids the word American — or any variant of it — to be on the ballot as part of a party name, according to the Election Law Blog.

Qualifying a slate of 435 House candidates, were Mr. Musk to take his idea national, would require about three times as many petition signatures as putting a presidential candidate on the ballot in every state and could cost more than $50 million just in signature gathering, Mr. Winger said.

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board is taking local officials in DC to task for refusing to implement a voter initiative to use ranked-choice voting in the District. Voters in the District overwhelmingly approved an initiative that adopts ranked-choice voting and allows independent voters to participate in primary elections. DC officials are apparently refusing to fund the reforms.

From to the editorial:

But many of D.C.’s elected officials — who might face some real competition under this new system — are stalling the reforms.

That begins with Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), who opposed the initiative and criticized ranked-choice voting ahead of last year’s election as “a very complicated election system.” Even though a large majority of voters — including most members of her own party — disagreed, she refused to include any funding in her proposed 2026 budget for the reforms, which are supposed to be in place for next year’s primary elections.

Some D.C. Council members are resisting, too. Council member Anita Bonds (D-At Large), a critic of ranked-choice voting who chairs the committee overseeing D.C.’s elections, also refused to dedicate money for the changes, even though city officials estimate the initiative will require $1.6 million to train election officials and fund a public education campaign. Instead, Bonds called on the Board of Elections to develop an “implementation plan” without a clear timeline. In a statement, she said voter initiatives are “not fully implemented immediately without further debate or changes” and noted that I-83 is “still in active litigation.”

Indeed, the D.C. Democratic Party is challenging the initiative in court, though its arguments are unpersuasive. That includes, for example, the party’s contention that the measure violates a requirement that the city conduct partisan primaries — even though those primaries would still take place under I-83. The party also claims the system would threaten religious freedom because churches that host polling locations might be closed for longer if ranked-choice voting slows down the process.

There has been considerable attention to a slight shift to the right among some nonwhite voters in the 2024 Presidential election. See, for example, here, here, and here. Lenny Bronner and Andrew Van Dam have a story … Continue reading

Politico‘s Michael Schaffer has this piece on the complications of covering our gerontocratic political representatives. The subject in this case is D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton. The story also raises a question about the ethical responsibility of journalists when they… Continue reading

Great thanks to Rick Pildes for doing a fantastic job on the blog this past week. As he mentioned, I’ll be your cruise director for the remainder of the week.