I used to live in Oregon – the closed primary always seemed like teh suck to me. The flat primary works very nicely, especially when combined with mail-in balloting, such as Oregon now has. It would be even better if a candidate pulling a majority in the primary was in right there and did not have to face a general election challenge (this happened in the '80s, when Bud “expose yourself to art” Clark wiped the floor with Frank Ivancie, winning the mayor’s race in the spring).
Oakland, CA now elects its mayor with instant runoff voting. It’s worth keeping tabs on. The 2010 race was interesting. It was a three-way race with Don Perata, a good fella representing machine politics and an occasional target of federal investigation, along with the 2 clean candidates Jean Quan and LGBT public policy wonk Rebecca Kaplan. Perata had the cash and organization, but lots of people wanted him out. But the clean vote was split.
Hey, no worries. Perata won a plurality, but not a majority based on the first choice tally. But few had him as their 2nd place choice. So Quan won the election on the basis of her 2nd place votes. The system worked.
This fall, there are like 20 candidates running for mayor. But a mere 6 have a shot. Article. The furthest left is Dan Siegel who wants a $15 minimum wage applying in Oakland. The next ideological grouping is made up of Jean Quan (incumbent), Rebecca Kaplan (her again) and newcomer and former Google exec Libby Schaaf. Then we reach what passes for the right - a bunch of moderate Democrats. They are Joe Tuman, Courtney Ruby & Bryan Parker.
Siegel doesn’t want to hire any new Oakland cops. Quan/Kaplan/Schaaf want to hire 100. Tuman/Ruby/Bryan want to hire 200-300 more. Or something like that. The point is you get a spectrum of choices. And you don’t have to worry too much about spoilers. I’m not sure about whether this is right for the Presidency (I’d have to think about that) but I’d support it for most other sizable elected positions.
I am in favor or else I potentially couldn’t vote. This is a caucus state which means I would have to change my registration, at least temporarily, to vote (you can do it at the door as long as you’re otherwise registered). I would’ve voted Democratic in 2008 solely because theirs wasn’t at ~8am!
Yeah, Quan is quite unpopular but Perata revels in the wannabe Vito Corleone stereotype. Yeah, I think IRV would be a potential disaster if forced into the Presidential elections but I’d like to see more of it otherwise.
I was wondering how exactly people think crossover voting would sabotage the other parties chances.
Let’s say you have two parties with two candidates each. Each party has one moderate and one extremist running.
Is the problem that the crossovers will vote for the extremist of the other party with the idea that less partisan voters in the general election will reject them out of hand?
Or, is the fear that they will vote for the moderate who won’t energize the base resulting in a lower partisan turnout?
Seems to me anyone using the first strategy only have themselves to blame if they get a representative that is the worst of the bunch because they were dumb enough to vote for them in a primary.
In 1996, the Republican candidate for governor of WA was a URW Christian lady, Ellen Craswell. It was pretty obvious she was not a proper fit for the state, but she won the crowded Republican primary with about 15%, over her nearest competitor at around 13%. Some attributed her win to cross-over monkey-wrenching (I know of people who claimed they crossed over to vote for her – the major Demcrats were pretty strong at that time, so no one was worried).
This obviously pissed off the Republicans, so they sued, on 1A-freedom-of-association-rights to eliminate the open primary. The state was forced to change the system, but the voters were not at all happy to have to declare affiliation, so they eventually instituted the flat (“jungle”) primary.
One quarter to one third of the electorate does not identify with either of the major parties. The closed primary system requires them to choose, which many find distasteful. The flat primary is a step in the right direction, as it leads toward reducing the undue influence of the big parties on the system – whether it ever actually gets there is another question entirely.
The fear is that the opposition will vote for the most unelectable dingbat. Worse, in many cases this is an asymmetric threat: if the incumbent doesn’t face a serious primary challenge, there is potential for mischief for one party, but not the other. Limbaugh famously inaugurated “Operation Chaos”, to undermine Hillary in 2008, but Democrats have plenty of opportunity to vote for Republican doofuses as well.
Whether an open primary with plurality voting is better or worse than the status quo involves weighing advantages and disadvantages. I think it’s probably worse for the Dems, but Republicans have a tendency to nominate crazies and if that’s a sufficiently large problem in a given state, then Republicans should support open primaries. Similarly, Democrats should oppose them.
All should join hands and support voting systems that better measure collective preferences and require less machinations. Luckily approval voting, instant runoff etc. have similar properties empirically: basically anything is better than winner take all schemes, which is what we mostly have now. Cite: one paper I read on a single British labor election.
The Oregon proposal involves a “Top two primary” aka “Jungle Primary”. The top 2 winners regardless of party move on to the general election. Such a system makes a lot of sense in districts dominated by one party or another. Under the status quo, the winner is chosen during the primary, and the opposition nominates a sacrificial lamb during the general election. In solid blue and solid red districts this produces safe seats in November and fears of a primary challenge in the Spring. So candidates end up trying to appeal to a small pool of primary voters – who tend to have more extreme positions.
I support the Oregon initiative. Vote yes on 90.
ETA: What happens in swing districts? I’m guessing that they would usually nominate members of both parties, but not always. But we would have to see. Regardless, most districts don’t tend to swing, so this isn’t my biggest concern. Anyway: experiment!
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The purpose of a primary is for the individual political parties to select their own candidates to run against the other parties candidates.
Open primaries allow anyone to vote for a parties candidate whether they support that parties platform or not. Might just as well skip the cost of the primary and put every candidate who qualifies on the General Election’s ballot.
In case it wasn’t clear, there are a number of permutations here.
1a. Open primary ballot. You choose your ballot on the day of the election. This permits mischief and cross-overs. I oppose this. But then again, I oppose the primary system.
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Smoke filled rooms. I support this. Mine is a minority position in the US, but it’s how most democracies operate.
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Jungle primary, with instant runoff voting. Some elections in California have this. It is a decent patch. I support this.
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Jungle primary, where voters choose 1 candidate and the top 2 choices go on to the November election. It maintains bad aspects of the current system with spoiler candidates and wasted votes. Probably an improvement over the status quo. This is the Oregon plan: prop 90. See my last post.
Some Democrats oppose prop 90, presumably because it threatens their lock on Oregon politics. An interesting treatment is here.
It substitutes more undue influence from big money – do you think that is an improvement?
Here in Minneapolis, the instant runoff voting was supposed to reduce the ‘negative campaigning’, because candidates need to get 2nd or 3rd choice votes from supporters of other candidates, so they would avoid attacking them. That seems to happen.
But to me, it seems to have resulted in ‘neutral campaigning’ – candidates won’t say anything that might upset any set of voters. They avoid taking any specific position on any contentious issues, and campaign on vague generalities and name recognition. Not an improvement, in my view.
I really liked the lack of negative campaigning (At least by the official campaigns: Hodges’ Twitter supporters got pretty nasty), but I agree with you on the neutral campaigning. What I really liked, though, is that we had 4-6 real candidates*, who all had a halfway decent shot at winning. It was refreshing to have that much real choice, even if it was hard to figure out real differences. I thought it was an improvement.
*And 30 fake ones, but that was a “$20 filing fee” issue, not a ranked-choice voting issue.
Really. I am not sure I see your logic. As it stands, big money is infesting the system anyway, I cannot see how a flat primary would change that.
A candidate with little money but a good message & hard work can persuade party delegates, and win the party endorsement, and then with the volunteers & other resources of the party, take on a big money candidate and win. Classic example here in Minnesota: the victory of Paul Wellstone over incumbent multimillionaire plywood-salesman Rudy Boschwitz.
Without the influence of a political party, it would be almost impossible for that to happen – such a flat primary system, without polkitical parties, will be won by the candidate with the most name recognition/money to buy that,
That how primaries have been used, but it’s because the parties have captured the political process. The less party-centric purpose of a primary election is to reduce the number of candidates in the general election. So instead of letting a few parties use the state-funded primary to pick one candidate per party, we can instead use the primary to select the two most popular candidates, regardless of party.
Parties may of course use their own internal mechanisms to select a candidate for the primary. There’s no reason to expect the government to pay for any part of that selection process.
Not the best example, there. In a flat primary, the numbers seem to suggest that Wellstone very easily would have made it to the general election – he got more votes in his race than Boschwitz did in his. And he was outspent in the general by a factor of 7 but still won. Just like in 2012, when Turdblossom spent $400M to win almost none of his campaigns.
Then, of course, you must also consider the “Tea Party”, which is filled with the most fringe of the fringe, but the Republican Party facilitates their advance and even effectively cedes control of the house to their minority voice. Parties do at least as much bad as good in this country, especially by their inherent support of a divided populace.
The political parties didn’t capture the political process, they created the political process. Groups of people gathered to elect officials they supported. The elected officials created the primary election. Any party can participate on that primary election date, if they qualify.
I think the political class is still working things out. My link to the Express article demonstrates that Oakland voters have had some pretty meaningful choices for the past 2 elections.
I’d advocate a $300 filing fee though, indexed to inflation.
I’d argue that instant runoff also increases the scope for third parties, as it alleviates concerns about spoiler candidates. Vote for your favorite candidate in the #1 slot, but make sure you include at least one viable one on your ballot. Unless you want to throw away your vote. Whether or not that is actually a good thing is a separate issue.
Holy crap, 70% no, what is wrong with Oregon? I absolutely detested the closed primary when I lived there, this really would have made the system better. Anything that weakens the grip of the parties is bound to make things better.