The case for ranked-choice voting and open primaries
Ranked-choice voting and open primaries aren't the only things we need to fix our democracy. But these reforms will help a lot, and they're on the ballot in states across the country.
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To the extent that press coverage extends past the marquee races and gets to ballot measures, most of that energy is focused on the 10 states where abortion access is directly on the ballot.1 That includes Missouri, which I wrote about a few weeks ago.
But there’s been little press coverage of a different set of ballot measures in seven states2—three Republican-leaning states, including Missouri; two swing states; and two Democratic-leaning states. Each relates to open primaries and/or ranked-choice voting.3
Those reforms won’t fix everything, but they will help end the partisan rancor that Americans are desperate to stop. They’re worthy of your support, because all of us are dissatisfied with the people we’re electing.
This is a path to electing better people, and to electing people better.
Please forward this to friends who live in Missouri or in one of the other states where open primaries and/or ranked-choice voting are on the ballot—Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, or Oregon.
If you live in Missouri, vote No on Amendment 7, which would preemptively ban these reforms. More below. You can also read my thoughts on Missouri’s Amendment 2 (Vote No) and Amendment 3 (Vote Yes).
The way we elect people is really dumb
Denny Hoskins will be Missouri’s next Secretary of State.
I wish that weren’t the case, because party affiliation aside, he’s nuts.4 There are competent Republicans out there, but he isn’t one of them. I’m going to vote for Democratic nominee Barbara Phifer. But Missouri is a red state, and she’s going to lose.
Secretary of State races are important, because they administer elections. Denny is probably going to do that very badly. But he’s going to be our next Secretary of State anyway.
Why?
There were eight candidates in the Republican primary for Secretary of State, and in states like Missouri—as I’ve written about before—whoever wins the Republican primary is the de-facto winner of the general election. And Denny will be the Secretary of State because he won a crowded primary with less than 25% of the vote:
As of 2022, Missouri had about 4.3 million registered voters. So with that in mind, here’s a quick run-down of the election that got Denny Hoskins, who wants to run Missouri’s elections by [checks notes] removing voting machines5 and who peddles baseless conspiracy theories just for kicks, elected as Missouri’s next Secretary of State:
15% of Missouri’s registered voters participated in this Republican primary election.
75.6% of people voted against him, which means that all of 3.4% of Missouri’s registered voters supported him in the primary.
Therefore, he’ll be our Secretary of State next year.
This is an insane way to choose our elected officials. We have to do better.
When you look at data like this, it’s no surprise that Americans overwhelmingly agree that democracy isn’t working the way that it should be:
Only 28% of Americans are satisfied with the way that democracy is working—38% of Democrats, and 17% of Republicans.
Only 22% of Americans trust the government, down from 77% at its peak 60 years ago.
Open primaries and ranked-choice voting allow for more voters to participate in elections that matter, and it helps us elect people whose views are more likely to represent the views of their constituents.
How do open primaries work?
In most states, you can pick a Republican ballot or a Democratic ballot. If you’re a committed Democrat in a Republican-leaning state, or vice versa, that usually means you basically have no say in determining who eventually gets elected.
With this reform, everyone—Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians, Greens, whoever—all run in the same open, all-candidate primary,6 rather than separate primaries. Voters get to pick their top choice, and the top vote-getters in this system—four or five, depending on the state—move onto the general election.
Ranked-choice voting is then used in the general election. Below are the reasons why that matters.
How does ranked-choice voting work, and why does it matter?
Here’s what ranked-choice voting is designed to accomplish:
Candidates have an incentive to appeal to as many voters as possible.7 That’s a good thing!
Independents can participate in the process. 43% of Americans consider themselves independents, compared to 27% who consider themselves Democrats and 27% who consider themselves Republicans.8
Americans want more options besides just Democrats and Republicans, and this creates a viable path to more robust choices.9
The idea is that someone can’t win an election with a mere plurality, but rather with a majority of 50% + 1 vote. Here’s an illustration of how it works:
The effect of this is that people running for office have an incentive to appeal to as many voters as possible. And voters can vote their conscience—for independents and for third parties, for example—without feeling like they’re wasting their vote.
Political parties in power don’t support open primaries and ranked-choice voting. That’s why you should support it.
Idaho is a Republican state, and Idaho’s Proposition 1 is opposed by their Republican governor and the chair of their state Republican party. In Nevada, where most of the state-wide elected officials are Democrats, Democrats are opposed to Nevada’s Question 3.
They’re opposed because open primaries and ranked-choice voting weaken the power of established political parties. That’s also a good thing. In a world where so many Americans are dissatisfied with both political parties, reforms that weaken the ironclad rule of one political party should be celebrated.
That may be bad for elected officials looking to hold onto their jobs, but it’s good for voters, good for competition, and good for democracy. And competition is healthy and necessary for democracy to thrive.10
By the way, in the states where ranked-choice voting is already happening—in Maine and in Alaska—this is working the way that it’s supposed to.
Maine, a Democratic-leaning state, has a Democratic Governor, an Independent Senator, a Republican Senator, and two Democratic members of the House—including Jared Golden, who’s probably the most conservative11 Democrat in the House caucus.
Alaska, a Republican-leaning state, has a Republican governor, two Republican Senators—one of whom, Lisa Murkowski, is probably most liberal member of the Senate Republican caucus—and a Democratic member of the House.
In short, their elected officials mirror the people who live in Maine and Alaska, which presumably is what we want.
The key argument against ranked-choice voting dismissively assumes voters are idiots
There’s a word that keeps coming up in the arguments against ranked-choice voting. That word? “Complex.” Take these two examples:
From a Democratic-leaning group in Nevada: “Ranked choice vote ballots are…an overly complex and burdensome process.”
From a Republican State Rep. in Idaho: “Do not sign this complex petition with ulterior motives.”
The problem with this? It’s not true.
We rank things in our lives all the time. And asking voters to rank which of four candidates they like most? Voters are capable of doing that, and it’s a nonsense argument that it’s somehow “too complex” to ask voters to have ranked preferences.12
In Alaska, after their first-ever ranked-choice voting election, 85% of voters described the process of ranking candidates as simple, and 95% said they received clear instructions.13
Voter turnout is higher in elections that deploy ranked-choice voting.14 If it really were so complex, that wouldn’t be the case.
Where ranked-choice voting is on the ballot
Alaska (a Republican-leaning state), where a potential repeal is on the ballot.
Colorado (a Democratic-leaning state)
Idaho (a Republican-leaning state)
Missouri (a Republican-leaning state), where a potential ban is on the ballot.
Oregon (a Democratic-leaning state)
Politically, it’s a broad range of states.17 Wanting better and less divisive elections is not a partisan issue.
Amendment 7 in Missouri
Missouri’s Amendment 7 is peculiar in that it doesn’t really do anything:
It bans non-citizens from voting in Missouri elections, which is already illegal.
It bans ranked-choice voting, which isn’t happening anywhere in Missouri anyway.
If Missourians want ranked-choice voting, we’d have to affirmatively vote for it as a ballot measure in a future election.
It’s not the most important amendment on Missouri’s ballot this cycle. Nonetheless: you should vote against Amendment 7. Send a clear signal that you don’t support this kind of performative politics. And in the meantime, we can hope that other states—Republican, Democratic, and swing—will show us the way.
Are open primaries and ranked-choice voting perfect? Will they solve everything? No, most certainly not. Are there better ways that we could be electing people? Maybe.
But in states across the U.S., this is the option that voters have. And it’s a pretty great one.
Feel free to share this post with someone who might find it interesting. And if you don’t live in Missouri, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, or Oregon, share this post with someone who does. (If you’re reading this email because someone sent it to you, please consider subscribing.)
Since the repeal of Roe v. Wade, abortion access ballot measures haven’t failed anywhere in the country, but this cycle includes some of the most challenging states to get abortion access codified in state constitutions. Some of the states (like South Dakota) are overwhelmingly Republican. And Florida requires its constitutional amendments to be approved by a 60% supermajority, rather than a simple majority.
Montana has a ballot measure of its own that could, but won’t necessarily, lead to ranked-choice voting.
Also known as “instant-runoff voting” or a few other names.
Don’t just take my word for it; his campaign issues page paints a nice picture.
How to run safe elections has become a political hot potato, but it’s worth noting: this is an insane perspective.
Lots of states do this already: Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, California, and Washington state.
Today, if there are eight candidates running—as there were in Missouri’s Secretary of State race—there’s no difference between being someone’s second choice and someone’s eighth choice.
That’s a poorly designed system: you’re likely to have far more shared policies and priorities with your second-choice candidate than with your eighth-choice candidate. But our election system doesn’t pick up on that.
In many states, independents are iced out of voting in primaries. Missouri allows independents to vote in primaries—for now. Efforts are underway to change that.
25% of Americans, and growing, believe that neither party represents their views well. That includes 30% of Americans under 50. Among men under 30, 37% hold an unfavorable view of both parties—which is not surprising, given the unaddressed challenges of being a young man today, but it is alarming.
Furthermore, 68% of Americans want more choices besides Democrats and Republicans but don’t want to waste their vote. This solves that problem too, giving voters more choices.
Though he might challenge that label, or any label that’d box him in.
I do think there’s some limit to this. In New York City’s 2021 mayoral election, for example, there were 13 candidates, and that does get burdensome. Not for nothing: the primaries were still partisan Democratic primaries, which misses a key part of these reforms. In any event, the way these ballot measures are structured is a lot better than the way NYC ran its election a few years ago.
For context, the National Park Service—the most popular branch of the U.S. federal government—has 76% approval rating. Nurses, the most trusted professionals, are trusted by 78% of Americans. People can’t agree on anything and seem to trust no one, and yet 85% of Alaskans found the process simple. Literally the only thing I could find that was polling above 85%? “95% of Americans say that protecting the water in our nation’s lakes, streams and rivers is important.” Fair enough.
The theory is that people running for office engage with a wider range of voters throughout their campaigns.
Arizona doesn’t technically have to do ranked-choice voting—it could do top-two voting, for example—but it would set up a single, nonpartisan primary.
To get ballot measures into the state constitution in Nevada, voters have to ratify it in back-to-back elections. They already did so in 2022.
Geographically, it’s not very diverse. In part, that’s because it’s much easier to get things on the ballot west of the Mississippi, as those states (generally) joined the United States later and have a more robust history of direct democracy.