Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Straight-ticket voting's steady disappearance reaches Utah

Straight-ticket ballot

Utah has joined the trend of scrapping straight-ticket voting.

Cache County Board of Elections

Utah is the latest state to end straight-ticket voting, which means providing a single spot on the ballot for supporting one political party's entire slate of candidates.

That form of voting was once a big feature of American elections but has steadily lost support in recent years. The argument mainly espoused by Republicans, that participatory democracy is improved by requiring separate choices in each contest, has triumphed over the argument mainly advanced by Democrats, that speed and convenience at the polls will assure strong turnout especially in urban precincts.

Utah is the seventh state to do away with the practice in the past decade. With its switch, signed into law by Republcian Gov. Gary Herbert this week, just five states are expected to have the single-vote option this fall: Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Michigan.


Michiganders went against the grain and revived the straight-party option in a 2018 referendum, three years after the Legislature eliminated it. In the intervening time, a federal court ruled that ending the practice would lead to an unconstitutional suppression of the African-American vote.

A similar claim is now being pressed by Democrats in Texas, who have filed a lawsuit alleging minority voters will be disproportionately hurt by massive delays at the polls this fall if the new ban on straight-party voting in Texas is permitted to take effect.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Although Utah is far more reliably Republican than Texas — which abolished the practice on essentially straight party-line legislative votes — its decision to end blanket partisan voting ended up passing with broad bipartisan support on the final night of the Legislature's session, a 25-1 vote in the Senate quickly followed by a 44-27 roll call in the House.

One reason appeared to be that the effort had been pushed for eight years by a veteran Democratic legislator, Patrice Arent, who is retiring this year and made it a major cause for her final term.

She argued that, at least in her state, the benefits to her party in Salt Lake City were about the same as the benefits to the GOP in the rest of the state.

But, she often said, "It doesn't matter who it helps or who it hurts. It's what we ought to be doing in our democracy."

President Trump could count on the state's six electoral votes with or without the switch. Four congressional contests and many state legislative races will also be on the ballot. And in addition to those partisan contests, voters will also be asked to choose in nonpartisan races for judgeships and many local offices — in which the vote count has customarily slipped because many casting straight-ticket ballots don't realize they did not cover the down ballot contests.

Read More

New York Post front page reads "Injustice." Daily News front page reads "Guilty."

New York's daily newspapers had very different headlines the morning after Donald Trump was convicted in s hush money trial.

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

Why the American media and their critics won’t stop telling the same lie

The American media has a bootleggers-and-Baptists problem.

Bootleggers and Baptists” is one of the most useful concepts in understanding how economic regulation works in the real world. Coined by economist Bruce Yandle, the term describes how groups that are ostensibly opposed to each other have a shared interest in maintaining the status quo. Baptists favored prohibition, and so did bootleggers who profited by selling illegal alcohol. And politicians benefited by playing both sides.

There’s an analogous dynamic with the press today.

Keep ReadingShow less