In episode 3 of the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Ballots & Bagels series, Elections Integrity Fellow David Levine is joined by Joseph Kirk, election supervisor for Bartow County, Georgia. They talked about preparing for and administering Georgia’s May 24th primary, as well as ways to strengthen trust in future elections.
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Yes, elections have consequences – primary elections to be specific
Nov 25, 2024
Can you imagine a Republican winning in an electoral district in which Democrats make up 41 percent of the registered electorate? Seems farfetched in much of the country. As farfetched as a Democrat winning in a R+10 district.
It might be in most places in the U.S. – but not in California.
Republican Rep. David Valadao won re-election in California's 22nd congressional district, where registered Republicans make up just shy of 28 percent of the voting population. But how did he do it?
It hasn't been easy. He won election in 2022 with 51.5 percent of the vote. This year, he kept his seat with 53.4 percent of the vote. There are, however, a number of variables at play as noted in the Politico piece, "How does Rep. David Valadao keep winning?"
One, he keeps a low profile. He is not out to get "Fox News famous," as one GOP strategist noted. The same strategist also noted that (2) he isn't extreme. "He’s focused on getting the work done."
Notably, Valadao is one of two Republicans who won re-election in 2024 that voted to impeach Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot – something that resulted in many Republicans who did the same losing their seats as a result of being primaried out.
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And still, Valado prevails. This highlights the most consequential variable: California's nonpartisan primary system.
(Primary) Elections Have Consequences
Voters hear the phrase "elections have consequences" a lot these days, but in truth most general elections aren't that consequential. Roughly 90 percent of U.S. House races in 2024 were decided before a single ballot was cast in the November general election.
This is because most districts are safe for one of the two major political parties in the U.S. as a result of partisan gerrymandering which secures districts for a party or because of voter self-sorting (meaning voters move to be with like-minded people).
The phrase that should be more normalized in the U.S. political ecosystem is "primary elections have consequences" because the primaries are the most critical stage of the publicly funded and administered elections process.
These are the elections that matter most, and where candidates actually win their seats.
Most are conducted under a partisan primary structure in which voters are immediately divided between a Republican ballot and a Democratic ballot. Candidates are incentivized to appeal to the voters who participate, which in many cases means only party members.
And historically, these elections do not draw a high turnout. Even among registered party members, it's a fraction of the total.
Due to the small voting pool and limited candidate options (only candidates of a single party), this allows party bosses, aligned special interests, and even ideological movements to weaponize these elections against politicians.
Toe the line – or else
Right now, for example, there is a question of how much pushback President-Elect Donald Trump will get from members of his own party on more controversial decisions, like appointing Matt Gaetz as Attorney General or his proposed policy on tariffs.
“If legislators get out of line, he (Trump) will threaten to support a primary challenge to them in two years. That threat will quiet many possible critics," said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
And threats have already been made.
"If you voted for [Merrick] Garland and won’t vote for Gaetz, you will face an immediate primary challenge," wrote conservative activist and Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk on X.
Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville warned his colleagues on Fox Business that they can challenge Trump on Gaetz if they want, but if they do, "we’re going to try to get you out of the Senate, too, if you try to do that.”
Those who operate within the system know the consequences of primary elections. They don't just elect most members of Congress but shape the political landscape to be filled with elected officials who put personal and partisan interests first.
And when candidates entrench themselves deeper behind their party's brand, it widens the division between both sides each election cycle, raising the stakes of elections that are defined only by winners and losers.
Why California Is Different
In most other states, a Republican running in a D+10 district would not be treated as a serious contender in the general election. Just like no one would pay much attention to a Democrat running in a R+10 district.
But in the Central Valley in California, party labels don't always matter – especially as the electoral landscape continues to shift in the region.
California's 22nd congressional district is 41 percent Democrat, 28 percent Republican, and 23 percent No Party Preference (NPPs), a substantial chunk of the electorate that can shift the campaign environment entirely under a nonpartisan system.
Under California's Top Two election model, Rep. David Valadao doesn't run in a primary for the 28 percent of the voting population that is registered Republican. He runs in a primary open to all candidates and the entire registered electorate.
This means that from the start he doesn't have to shift his messaging much from the primary to the general election, nor does he have to cater only to a handful of voters who are part of the political minority.
He can keep a low profile. He can be less extreme. He can vote his conscience on the floor of the U.S. House and not be threatened with being primaried because he can draw support from voters outside his party's base.
Remember, Valadao was one of two Republicans who voted for Trump's impeachment after Jan. 6, 2021. The other was Rep. Dan Newhouse of Washington. Guess what California and Washington have in common.
That's right. They both use a nonpartisan Top Two primary system.
Valadao won re-election with 53 percent of the vote, something he could not have done without support from registered Republicans, NPPs and other voters outside the two major parties, AND moderate Democrats who are satisfied with his job performance.
This is the consequence of a primary election system that puts accountability above party loyalty and why nonpartisan election reformers stress the importance of primary reform to give every voter, especially independent voters, an equal voice in the process.
Griffiths is the national editor of Independent Voter News, where a version of this story first appeared.
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A better direction for democracy reform
Nov 12, 2024
Drutman is a senior fellow at New America and author "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America."
This is the conclusion of a two-part, post-election series addressing the questions of what happened, why, what does it mean and what did we learn? Read part one.
I think there is a better direction for reform than the ranked choice voting and open primary proposals that were defeated on Election Day: combining fusion voting for single-winner elections with party-list proportional representation for multi-winner elections. This straightforward solution addresses the core problems voters care about: lack of choices, gerrymandering, lack of competition, etc., with a single transformative sweep.
And yes, I understood the case many made behind the smaller changes: Get some wins, build momentum, get people comfortable with the idea of electoral reform.
Given these overwhelming losses, it’s time to reconsider that strategy.
Still: Why did these reforms fail so badly and decisively, across the board?
Honestly, I’m surprised. My theory is that these reforms fell into a dead zone where they were not transformative enough to excite and energize voters who want big change, while simultaneously provoking a reflexive status quo bias against the added complexity. It also didn’t help that election administrators set off alarms about implementation.
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Hopefully, the overwhelming failure of these reforms will spur a strategic rethink in the electoral reform community. It’s now time to focus on reforms that support stronger, healthier parties — and more than two of them!
Your donations to the campaigns were (overwhelmingly) wasted. And maybe even counter-productive:
The campaigns begged for and received billions of dollars of your money this cycle. Upwards of $16 billion. The presidential campaigns accounted for almost $4 billion of that. Most of that money went to all that annoying advertising. Kamala Harris’ campaign outspent Donald Trump’s campaign. But Trump won.
Did any of that money make a difference? Probably not. (I wrote a longer piece skewering the campaign fundraising-consulting industrial complex.)
My basic point was that once a campaign gets beyond a certain threshold, extra money becomes pointless. Perhaps even counter-productive. Yet, the campaigns keep asking for the money. They ask, because campaign consultants who run campaigns get very rich making and producing ads. Broadcast and especially social media companies get very rich. But not only are these constant fundraising asks and campaign ads annoying. They are also overwhelmingly negative and anxiety-inducing. All this is very bad for our democracy. It probably makes the doom loop even worse.
Hopefully, we can spend some of that money elsewhere next time.
The arc of history is squiggly
We like to think there is some linear progress to history. But history is full of ups and downs. History is a sine wave. The arc of history is squiggly.
I take some comfort in this.
And often a “down” portends a future “up.”
I previously argued that sometimes, when a system gets so FUBAR, collapse is necessary for renewal. As I wrote:
My readings into complex systems (and history) point to an unfortunate pattern: sometimes collapse is necessary for renewal.
This idea goes against our instincts for control. But there it is.
Take forest management. Turns out, small fires are vital to a forest's long-term resilience. These small fires clear out accumulated fuel, make space for new growth, and bring nutrients back into the soil. Without them, tall trees crowd out everything else, making the whole forest vulnerable to devastating wildfires. ...
Complex systems can appear hopelessly rigid right before transformation. Yet beneath seemingly calcified patterns, the potential for renewal often lies dormant. Consider again our forest management analogy: After decades of fire suppression, forests don't just contain accumulated fuel—they also harbor dormant seeds awaiting an opportunity.
So that is perhaps the silver lining — sometimes things need to get worse before they can get better. But I’ll admit that’s not much silver right now.
Now what? Maybe something new?
I hope this moment is generative. I hope it creates space for some new ways of thinking about our political moment and the prospects for reform and renewal.
I hope it becomes clearer that we need a much bolder and ambitious vision for democracy reform. I eagerly offer my More Parties, Better Parties vision, built around both the structural reforms of proportional representation and fusion voting and a vision of political parties as genuine intermediary institutions, connecting citizens and government. Let’s discuss.
I also take encouragement from the surprise performance of independent Nebraska Senate candidate Dan Osborn. He didn’t win. But he made a Senate race in solidly Republican Nebraska highly competitive. He did so by running as a working-class economic populist without the burden of the Democratic Party label. He even talked about the two-party doom loop!
Given how toxic the Democratic Party brand is in so many parts of the country, I really hope we see more Osborn-style candidacies. Otherwise, the Senate will likely stay in Republican control for a long time to come.
What I’m worried about
But I also have some real worries, beyond the obvious ones about how destructive and dangerous a second Trump administration will be (you can read about that on every liberal website).
I worry that Democrats will spend too much time playing counterfactual blame games now. (What if Joe Biden had dropped out earlier? What if Harris had picked Josh Shapiro instead of Tim Walz? What if Harris had settled on a campaign slogan?) I worry that Democrats will finger external factors like foreign interference, misinformation or Elon Musk, rather than confronting the need for fundamental change. This blame-shifting serves mainly to exonerate current leadership. Real leadership means admitting when you’ve made a mistake and when it’s time to change.
I also worry that Democrats will just simply revert to counting on Trump and Republicans to overreach and for thermostatic public opinion to predictably turn against Trump and deliver a repeat of 2018 and 2020. It may work out that way. But it may not.
We need a moment of genuine transformation
My bottom line is that our current political arrangement is only growing more unsustainable. Incremental reform, blame-gaming and business-as-usual are not acceptable responses. To renew and revive the American experiment in collective self-governance, we need something more visionary and more transformative. This is a moment for imagination and big-picture thinking.
This article was first published in Undercurrent Events.
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Let’s make sense of the election results
Nov 11, 2024
Drutman is a senior fellow at New America and author of "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America."
Well, here are some of my takeaways from Election Day, and some other thoughts.
1. The two-party doom loop keeps getting doomier and loopier.
This was an ugly campaign. The tone was very nasty. The threats and dehumanizations grew quite dark. This is the two-party doom loop in depressing motion: a vicious cycle of escalating rhetoric around continually high-stakes, narrowly decided elections. As parties become more polarized, they compromise less and demonize more. It only gets worse and worse.
This self-reinforcing logic cuts at the foundational core of the democratic bargain — mutual toleration and forbearance. I only see it getting worse under a second Trump administration, which promises to be even more combative and vindictive.
Authoritarian leaders benefit from polarizing conflict. The ruthless us-versus-them dynamic gives them power to fight “the enemy within.”
The conflict is only going to grow more intense. Doomier and loopier, I often find myself thinking. This election did not reveal any off-ramps.
This makes me sick. It is like being on the scariest roller coaster ever and not being able to get off.
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2. The anti-system vibes remain strong — and bad for incumbents.
Americans are in a sour mood and have been for a while. Overwhelming majorities report feeling dissatisfied with the way things are going in this country. For the last few years, the share of Americans feeling satisfied has hovered around 20 percent.
Such persistent dissatisfaction does not help incumbents. As I wrote earlier this year, no national political figure is viewed favorably. Incumbency, once an advantage in politics, is now a liability. Every election is now a “change” election.
This rumbling anti-incumbent dissatisfaction appears to be a global phenomenon, across democracies. We are in a kind of era of discontent. But this discontent seems especially pronounced in the United States. More than two-thirds of Americans think “the system” needs to change.
Harris at times tried to pitch her campaign as a “fresh start.” But ultimately she fell back on a campaign of continuity and defending the (distrusted) institutions. As the sitting vice president, she really had no other choice.
The big problem is that when voters are unhappy with the status quo, they only have one other choice. If that choice happens to be an authoritarian, then voters who just want “change” may wind up with fascism.
3. Complicated, incremental electoral reform is not a winning path out of the doom loop.
In six states plus the District of Columbia, voters had the option to open up their party primaries, adopt ranked choice voting or both, via ballot initiative. In one state, Alaska, voters were asked whether to preserve their reform.
Only Washington, D.C., voted in favor of open primaries and ranked-choice voting.
As an electoral reform nerd, this round-the-board rejection of primary and RCV reform was the biggest shock of the night. I had expected reform to pass in at least Oregon and Colorado, and possibly Nevada.
So what happened? Let me break it down.
In four states, the open primaries and rankedc hoice voting initiatives were yoked together into one initiative.
In Colorado, voters rejected Proposition 131, which would have moved the state to a top-four “all candidate” primary and a ranked choice voting election. (The vote was 55 percent no to 45 percent yes.)
In Nevada, voters rejected the same proposition (but with a top-five primary), by a similar margin (54 percent to 46 percent).
In Idaho, voters rejected their version of the measure even more overwhelmingly — 69 percent against, 31 percent in favor.
In Alaska, voters were deciding whether to keep their top-four-plus-ranked-choice-voting system, which they had approved narrowly in 2020 (when it was paired with a provision to eliminate dark money). The Alaska repeal effort appears to have narrowly succeeded, thus ending Alaska’s short-lived experiment with open primaries and RCV.
Only in my super-liberal home city of D.C. did an RCV and semi-open primaries initiative pass.
In other states, ranked choice voting and open primaries were on the ballot separately.
In Oregon, voters rejected a standalone ranked choice voting proposition (60 percent against, 40 precinct in favor). In Arizona, voters rejected Proposition 140, to create a single, all-candidate open primary by a similar margin (59 percent no to 41 percent yes).
In Montana, voters considered two separate initiatives: CI-126, to create a single open primary, like Arizona, and CI-127, to require a majority winner. Voters decisively opposed CI-127, but as of this writing, they have only narrowly opposed CI-126, which remains too close to call.
Finally, South Dakota decisively rejected a top-two primary reform (modeled on California and Washington), 68 percent against to 32 percent in support.
Frankly, I think voters made the right choices in all these places, even if they didn’t always do it for the right reasons.
To me, the open-primaries-plus-RCV combo (often billed as “fiinal four voting” or “final five voting”) only further weakens parties (by pushing parties further out of the business of nomination). My view has long been that we need to build healthier and stronger parties. And that starts with giving parties more control over their nominating process, rather than allowing any schmuck to claim the legitimating label. These reforms would have moved us further in the wrong direction.
This combination also adds confusion and complexity to elections (making life difficult for already over-taxed election administrators). And making elections “nonpartisan” increases campaign costs and makes money even more important. This benefits wealthy candidates and donors even more than the existing system. The United States already has the most “open” primaries of any democracy in the world. Only in the United States can you register (for free!) as a member of a party and get to choose that party’s nominee.
I think there is a better direction for reform: combining fusion voting for single-winner elections with party-list proportional representation for multi-winner elections. This straightforward solution addresses the core problems voters care about: lack of choices, gerrymandering, lack of competition, etc., with a single transformative sweep.
And yes, I understood the case many made behind the smaller changes: Get some wins, build momentum, get people comfortable with the idea of electoral reform.
Given these overwhelming losses, it’s time to reconsider that strategy and explore new options and approaches.
This will be the subject of Part 2 tomorrow.
This article was first published in Undercurrent Events.
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Despite setbacks, ranked choice voting will continue to grow
Nov 11, 2024
Mantell is director of communications for FairVote.
More than 3 million people across the nation voted for better elections through ranked choice voting on Election Day, as of current returns. Ranked choice voting is poised to win majority support in all five cities where it was on the ballot, most notably with an overwhelming win in Washington, D.C. – 73 percent to 27 percent.
For state ballot measures, the status quo won the day – with a ballot measure to implement RCV losing in Oregon, and ballot measures to implement open primaries and RCV falling in Colorado, Idaho and Nevada. A ballot measure to keep RCV in Alaska is neck-and-neck and may take several days to call, with absentee ballots continuing to arrive for 15 days.
“Ranked choice voting took a step forward on Election Day 2024, as voters in our nation’s capital and several cities said yes to better elections,” said my colleague, FairVote President and CEO Meredith Sumpter. “We celebrate the countless hours that local and state advocates have spent turning their frustration with today’s politics into real progress. Alaska and Maine also used ranked choice voting to elect the president and other key officials, and 10 cities across the nation held smooth and successful RCV elections.”
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Changing the status quo is never easy. Entrenched interests — including several state parties and an increasingly well-organized national opposition — pushed back hard on this year’s statewide ballot measures. But make no mistake: The future remains bright for ranked choice voting.
Ranked choice voting was used in only 10 cities and zero states in 2016, and has now grown to over 50 cities, counties and states that are home to nearly 17 million people.
We also see clear signs that voters like ranked choice voting once they get to use it — the Oregon ballot measure is performing best in counties in the state that already use ranked choice voting, and the Alaska ballot measure is outperforming the other statewide measures. We’ll continue to see ranked choice voting deliver in cities and the states where it’s used, and we also have to make a stronger case on how RCV benefits voters and elected officials alike.
The data is on our side, and the reform will continue to grow because it works — empowering voters, rewarding candidates who can deliver for the majority of their constituents, and making our democracy work better for the American people.
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