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October 29, 2004
Election thoughts: prop. 62
California has an interesting decision to make on this year’s ballot. Proposition 62 (the Voter Choice open primary act).
Under the existing system, the State holds elections in November, said elections being between candidates nominated by various parties. These candidates are chosen by political parties during state-conducted Primary Elections...
The system proposed by Prop 62 would change the primary by not letting parties to enter into it. Primaries would be completely “open” (to candidates who jump through certain hoops). The top two vote-getters in the primary would be the only ones onto the November ballot...
I’m not going to make arguments for or against this. I just want to look at what this does. Because as near as I can tell (writing this at the beginning of the article), the net effect will be 0...
Immagine that there are 5 candidates for Governor on the Primary ballot, 3 Up and 2 Down. The Candidates of the Up get 18%, 19%, 18%, while the Down candidates get 25% and 20% of the vote. This creates a situation in which the only candidates for General election are of the Down-- a situation that a majority of voters did not favor. This election would end up as something of a forgone conclusion-- whichever candidate is closest to the middle ends up winning by a landslide...
What happens in the next election is a Up Block emerging, dedicated to getting 1 of the 3 Ups off the ballot, for the “common good”. Or, quite possibly the Up voters get so upset by the way Down is taking the state that they pool their efforts around 1 Up candidate in the primary, ensuring that only she will be there for the state electors to vote for. Indeed, this is pretty much exactly what happened to Ross Perot in 1996, and will probably happen to Nadar this coming election...
Don’t take my word for it: just cast your mind back to the French Presidential Election of 2001. The French use a system to choose their president similar to the one described in Prop 62, (with a completely different parliamentary system on top of it. Really, it is a model of complication and oddness), and their presidential electoral system tends to favor 2 main parties...
Note that we are capable of having the same outcomes under both systems, though. We would still have a first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system, and in any system like that there is a tendency towards the mean...
One final thought on the implications of the change on a state-wide level: It may well make the Party system stronger, rather than weaker. If the second election, under the terms outlined above, consists of candidates chosen by the Up Party, this process would be less transparent than the one we have currently. Without making a judgment on the value of transparency, this is something that might be useful to bear in mind...
On the local level, the situation may be a bit different. It may well be the case that voters are voting for a party, in addition to a candidate. Specifically, voters should well know that a vote for (say) a Republican in the US Senate is a vote for Bill Frist as Senate Majority Leader. So a district may not care for an incumbent, but stick by that person as a way of maintaining their preferred party’s hold on legislative majorities (or to avoid eroding minorities even further). As (admittedly weak) evidence of this I offer Allan Keyes polling 1/3rd of the vote in his run for one of Illinois’ Senate Seat. Perhaps if radical incumbents were to run against moderate challengers, and electors were guaranteed that they were also casting a vote for the same party within legislatures, voters would take the chance...
On the other hand, this is what the primaries are ostensibly for, so this whole issue may well be a non-starter. In the end, I’ll probably end up voting for the measure. I don’t see how it can hurt, it will probably be a lot of smoke and noise over nothing...
Posted by Andrew at October 29, 2004 09:22 PM
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