Top Five Reasons Why Californians Should Reject Top-Two Primaries

This article by Dave Schwab originally appeared on greenchange.org.

On 8 June 2010, voters in California will decide the fate of Proposition 14, the Top Two Primaries Act. Not only is the top two proposal unnecessary, unpopular, undemocratic, unconstitutional, and unrealistic, it’s not even the best way to ensure that elections are won by candidates with majority support. Let’s explore the top five reasons why California voters should reject top two:

1. Top two is unnecessary. Instant runoff voting, an improved voting system used in San Francisco and other California cities, delivers the advantages of top two without its drawbacks. Even with more than two candidates on the ballot, instant runoff voting, or IRV, ensures that the winner has majority support. With IRV, voters rank the candidates in their order of preference – in the words of proponents, “IRV is as easy as 1, 2, 3.” If no candidate receives a majority of first-place votes, the candidate with the least votes is eliminated. Instead of being discarded, votes for the eliminated candidate are transferred to voters’ next choices. This process continues until one candidate has a majority.

Instant runoff voting has several clear advantages. It eliminates the common problem of “spoiled elections”, in which one candidate wins without majority support. In the same way, it eliminates the problem of similar candidates “splitting the vote”, and actually encourages positive campaigning, since candidates have an interest in appealing to their opponents’ supporters. With IRV, only one election is necessary rather than two, which saves taxpayer money and keeps voter turnout high. Finally, since IRV produces a majority winner no matter how many candidates are on the ballot, it allows for an informative and broad debate during election season, with voters exposed to a range of views before making their decision.

Top two is a deeply flawed system in comparison with instant runoff voting. With top two, vote splitting will still be a problem in multi-candidate races. Negative campaigning will become the norm under top two: like a game of king of the mountain, candidates will throw each other in the mud in hopes of coming out on top. With top two, two elections are necessary, so taxpayers shovel out more for elections with lower turnout.

If top-two passes, the political discourse will suffer, because the period between June primaries and November elections, currently the most active time for public debate, will be purged of the independent, third party, and grassroots candidates who so often bring fresh, innovative ideas to politics. Instead, the range of opinions voters hear will be restricted to two candidates, often from the same party.

Instant runoff voting has all the advantages of top two and more, without any of top two’s drawbacks. Why should voters accept an unnecessary and flawed system, when a better system is already gaining ground throughout California?

2. Top two is unpopular. In 2004, California voters rejected top two by voting 54% against Proposition 62. In 2008, voters in Oregon rejected Ballot Measure 65, which would have established a top two system, in a landslide of 66%.

Instant runoff voting, on the other hand, has been approved by voters in San Francisco, Berkeley, Davis, and Oakland by margins of 56%, 72%, 55%, and 69%, respectively. Charter amendments authorizing use of instant runoff voting have passed in San Leandro and Santa Clara counties. After using IRV for the first time, 82% of San Francisco voters said they preferred IRV to the city’s previous election system.

If voters like instant runoff voting so much, why are California politicians pushing for top two, which Californians have already rejected, and which was just rejected by a full two thirds of voters in Oregon?

3. Top two is undemocratic. By design, top two restricts voter choice. By cutting down the field of candidates in primary season, which is notoriously dominated by wealthy special interests and party bosses, top two guarantees that most independent and third-party candidates, as well as grassroots candidates in the major parties, will be out of the race before most voters and journalists are even paying attention. Americans can feel that this is undemocratic; voters have the right to vote for the candidates and parties they agree with, and the public discourse suffers when independent voices are cut out of the debate.

Proponents of top two like to argue that it won’t hurt third parties and independents. Richard Winger of Ballot Access News, America’s leading expert on ballot access laws, explains why this is false: “In practice, top two would eliminate minor party and independent candidates from the November ballot. We know this is true because Washington State tried the system for the first time in 2008, and that’s what happened. Washington, for the first time since it became a state in 1889, had no minor party or independent candidates in November for any statewide state race or for any congressional race.”

Top two would effectively restrict voter choice to two parties – or one party in many districts. Although the Constitution makes no mention of political parties, the practical effect of top two would be to give the Democratic and Republican parties a monopoly on power. Which leads to the next problem with top-two:

4. Top-two is unconstitutional. Americans’ First Amendment right to association gives us the right to support any political party we choose. The right of political parties to run candidates for office is violated if the electoral system is set up to make it easy for dominant parties to push everyone else off the ballot. If the Democratic and Whig parties had passed laws like this in the 19th century, we would probably not have a Republican party today.

California’s top two measure would immediately disqualify the Libertarian and Peace and Freedom parties, further violating their members’ First Amendment right to free association. America’s founders warned that political parties could try to use their power to further their own narrow self interest. What would they think about a proposed law that would give two parties a virtual stranglehold on elections?

5. Top two is unrealistic. In theory, top two can work if everyone votes in the primary. In reality, primaries in the United States have consistently low turnout, are poorly covered by the media, and are unduly influenced by shadowy special interests and well-connected political machine insiders. Unless voters suddenly decide en masse to get engaged in the primary process, top two will mean that a small percentage of voters will decide who everyone else can and can’t vote for in November. How is that democratic?

The media already has enough trouble covering candidates’ positions on the issues, without treating politics as a horse race. If top two is passed, will the media suddenly decide to make the effort early in each election year to fully inform the voters about all their choices? Or will the media simply try to pick the top two winners based on how well known and well funded the candidates are – as many press outlets do already?

With such a short time before the top-two primary, the advantage to candidates with the money to bombard voters with advertising will be multiplied many times over. What will that mean in an era where corporations and their front groups can funnel billions of dollars into political campaigns?

Meanwhile, independent candidates who base their campaigns on good ideas and grassroots organizing will be drowned out by political insiders backed by corporate financing and political machine muscle.

The claim that top two will reduce gridlock in California’s legislature is baseless. In the words of election law expert Richard Winger, “The real cause of gridlock in the California legislature is the rule that budgets can only be passed by a two-thirds vote of each house of the legislature… The real solution to solve California’s budget gridlock is to eliminate the rule that the budget can only be passed with two-thirds of the legislators in each house… We should let the majority party in the legislature govern. If the voters elect a majority party, let that majority party pass its budget. If we don’t like that budget, we not only have recall, initiative or referendum, we can defeat the majority party in the next election and replace it.”

Realistically, top two will not accomplish what its proponents claim, aside from producing false “majority winners” selected by a plurality of a minority of voters. In other words, when 10% of voters turn out for the top two primary and vote 40% for Candidate A and 35% for Candidate B, that doesn’t mean that the other 92.5% of voters are going to feel that they have a satisfactory choice in either Candidate A or B.

Instead of front-loading the election cycle with a make-or-break top two primary, instant runoff voting would allow all candidates to compete in the general election, when the vast majority of voters actually turn out. Voters would get to hear and consider viewpoints from a wider range of candidates in the general election, not just two candidates who may well belong to the same party. After considering what all the candidates have to say, voters could get out their instant runoff ballots and support the candidates they agree with most, without fear of inadvertently helping the candidates they agree with least. Maybe that’s why voters prefer IRV: instead of feeling pressured to support the lesser of two evils, they can support their favorite candidates – whether liberal, conservative, moderate, Republican, Democrat, Green, Libertarian, Peace and Freedom, American Independent, or just plain independent – and know that their vote won’t be wasted.

The top five reasons to reject top-two, plus one

To recapitulate, top two is unrealistic – it won’t work like proponents claim it will. Top two is unconstitutional – it violates our civil rights by giving two parties an effective monopoly on power. Top two is undemocratic – it restricts voter choice and suppresses independent voices outside the two-party political establishment. Top two is unpopular – it has been rejected recently by voters in California and Oregon. Finally, top two is unnecessary, when instant runoff voting is better on all counts.

One last reason to vote against Proposition 14: top two is a top down proposal. Ballot measures like Prop 14 always come from political insiders, usually with the backing of wealthy special interests to help advertise the alleged benefits of top-two to a skeptical public. In contrast, instant runoff voting always comes from the grassroots; campaigns for IRV are led by active citizens, community organizers and voters’ rights groups like FairVote. Referendum victories show that voters like the idea of IRV, and exit polls show that voters like how it works in practice. If the goal is to fix California’s election system so that it will produce winners with majority support, why are Prop 14’s sponsors pushing the flawed, unpopular top two system, instead of instant runoff voting?

All Californians who value democratic freedoms and sincerely want a better electoral system should vote no on Proposition 14. Even members of the Republican and Democratic parties, if they heed the founders’ warnings about political factions, should recognize the danger of cementing the Democratic/Republican monopoly on power and vote no. You don’t have to be a Libertarian to value a Libertarian’s civil and political rights. For supporters of electoral reform, top two is just a distraction from the real goal of instant runoff voting. We have better options than top two – options that we might not know about today, if top two had been in place earlier to stifle independent voices in the public arena.