Opinion: Proposition 131 is not ready for prime time

I read Proposition 131 for the first time many weeks ago. The concepts in it were very appealing: open primaries and ranked choice voting (RCV) for candidates. But something didn’t feel right. I understand that no voting system is perfect. But identifiable problems should be fixed. Here are my thoughts on the major ones.

Prop 131 creates open primaries by allowing the candidates selected by political parties and qualifying unaffiliated candidates to be listed on a single primary ballot. In June each voter gets a single vote, and the top four vote-getters go on the November ballot. Therefore, there’s no guarantee that a particular party’s candidate will make the general election. 

Then in November, voters get to rank these four candidates. Using the standard RCV process, the one with the fewest first-place votes is dropped, and those voters’ second choices become their first choices, and the process is repeated until there’s a winner.

Because voters only get one vote, this primary process (to select candidates for the general election) forces voters to make strategic decisions. If you strongly prefer Candidate A but don’t think they have a very good chance of making the final cut, and B is barely OK with you but in your opinion has a better chance to make it onto the November ballot, do you vote for A or B? Forcing people to make such strategic decisions with so many unknown factors doesn’t make sense to me.

One solution is to let the voters support more than one primary candidate. Obviously, supporting an unlimited number doesn’t work; it’s the same as not making a choice. So, why not let voters indicate support for, say, around half as many slots as there would be in November? Voters then have the incentive to pick candidates they’d like to see on the final ballot, but with much less need to try to game this situation with its huge level of unknowns. And limiting it to around half pretty much ensures a variety of candidates in November. It seems like a reasonable compromise.

Under Prop 131, the four candidates who get the most primary votes make the cut for the November election. Why four? Why not five? In November, under RCV, voters will rank them from most to least desirable; ranking five doesn’t seem to me to be a significant burden, especially since voters are not required to rank all candidates. Allowing five candidates in November would also let voters support, say, three in the primary. And having that extra general election candidate would increase the competition of ideas, and so will likely improve the outcome for minimally increased effort.

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I have more serious issues with using the standard RCV method to select the winner from a ranked-choice ballot. I’ll illustrate the problem using three candidates: Radical, Moderate and Conservative. Suppose that around 35% of voters rank them Radical, Moderate, Conservative and another 35% rank them opposite, Conservative, Moderate, Radical, with the remaining 30% ranking Moderate first with second and third split. Under the standard RCV system, Moderate gets dropped in the first round because he/she only got 30%. The final is then between the two extremes, Radical and Conservative. But 65% of voters prefer Moderate to Radical and likewise, 65% prefer Moderate to Conservative. So rationally, Moderate, the one that most can live with, should be selected. But Moderate got dropped. Not a rational outcome.

The simple solution is to allow voters to rank their choices on the ballot, as Prop 131 proposes. But rather than dropping the candidate who gets the least first-place votes (as Prop 131 does), count the votes in head-to-head contests and drop those who lose until only one is left. This is called “Condorcet” voting. This counting process is more complicated but still doable. In my opinion, it’s well worth that small cost to avoid the potentially more polarized and less preferred outcome of the standard RCV process. To be complete, Condorcet voting has its own theoretical flaws. But they are highly unlikely to occur and can easily be addressed.

(To learn more about voting systems, check out this handy guide.)

Is Prop 131’s one-vote open primary better than the current system, where political parties use the primary to pick their candidates for the November ballot, and unaffiliated candidates can make the ballot by meeting minimum numerical requirements? Is having a flawed RCV system, that can lead to polarized outcomes, better than the current plurality approach, that doesn’t require a majority to win and has no runoff? Your call, but in my opinion, Prop 131 is just not ready.

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