In 2006 the voters of Pierce County, Washington (which includes Tacoma) passed a measure to use Instant Runoff Voting for county offices. This year, the Pierce County Council put a repeal of IRV on the November 3, 2009 ballot. The repeal is known as Amendment Number 3. The existing charter says, “The elections of all County officials, except judges and Prosecuting Attorney, shall be conducted using IRV.” The proposed repeal would replace that with “The elections of all County officials, including judges and Prosecuting Attorney, shall be conducted according to the state election method.”
Kelly Haughton, a leader of the pro-IRV forces in Pierce County, has observed that the proposal does not say that elections for County office should use the “top-two” system, which Washington state currently uses. This is probably because no one in Washington can be certain what the future “state election method” will be, given that “top two” is still under attack in a U.S. District Court in Washington. The opponents of IRV were apparently being careful when they wrote their ballot question, so that if it passes, and if the state’s election system changes again in the future, the change won’t invalidate the County measure.
Washington state has two types of elections, “partisan” and “non-partisan”. In the past, “partisan” elections were conducted using the blanket primary, then the infamous pick-a-party primary, and now the reform Top 2 primary. I-872 redefined a “partisan election” as one in which a candidate may express a preference for a party, and then goes on to provide the Top 2 procedure. A particular reason that the “party preference” portion of I-872 was not severable was because the expression of party preference, rather than the Top 2 method is the defining characteristic of a “partisan election” in Washington.
In a non-partisan election in Washington, there are no party references on the ballot and the election can be decided by simple majority in the primary. This is the system used for election of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Note that in California, the Top 2 proposal defines a new type of election for a “Voter-nominated office”, which goes alongside “partisan office” and “non-partisan office”. The only remaining partisan offices will be for President and party offices. California generally uses non-partisan elections for local and county offices, and will continue to do so. If there is a “political association” issue in California it will be over the “party preference” on the ballot, but the underlying Top 2 procedure for a “voter-nominated office” where all voters may participate in the election of officeholders is unquestionably constitutional.
One reason that Pierce County adopted IRV in the first place was to get out from under the Pick a Party primary. Localities are more likely to be under the domination of one party or the other; while local offices by their nature and function are less partisan than legislative or statewide offices.
Under the blanket primary all voters could vote in the primary for each office. If there were a couple of Democrats running for an office, they could simply vote for the one they prefer, even while voting in the Republican primary for other offices. The Pick a Party primary stopped that from happening, and IRV was a way around that since there could be multiple candidates of one party in the election. Top 2 will let voters go back to the old practice under the blanket primary but with an improvement since there is no issue of cross-party raiding.
Pierce County also made some offices non-partisan. A second reason for specifying the “state election method” is that state law has different methods for partisan offices and non-partisan offices. If Pierce County wanted to make the non-partisan offices be Top 2 elections, they would either have to specify the Top 2 procedure, or define those offices as being “partisan offices” but where an expression of party preference is not permitted.
Last year in King County, they switched to non-partisan elections for the county council (this effort was started before the Supreme Court issued their ruling in the Top 2 case). The County Council made a counter-proposal in which the elections would be “non-partisan” but that candidates could express a party preference (I am not making this up). Under the counter-proposal, the offices would be elected by majority, with a runoff if necessary, because they would be “non-partisan” offices. The voters chose the ordinary non-partisan option during the 2008 primary, and then approved non-partisan elections in November 2008.