Capitol Weekly, a California publication, has this article about California’s top-two system. Paul Mitchell, the author, is an officer of Political Data Inc. He has calculated the percentage of voters who cast a blank ballot, in November elections for Congress and partisan state office, in races with two candidates from the same party. He finds that sometimes up to 50% of the “orphaned voters” choose to leave their ballot blank rather than vote for a candidate from a party they don’t like.
Top Two is a small step forward in voting reform and those who opposed the progress should be held accountable for their ill-advised forray.
The United Coalition is on the cutting edge of democracy, the most advaned and perfect voting system known and we have united a team of hundreds with a structure for ecpanding under pure proportional representation.
Nobody has it as good as the United Coalition:
http://www.usparliament.org
James, you say nothing in your comment about the substance of the article. What do you say about the fact that so many voters would rather leave a blank ballot than cast a vote for someone they don’t want to vote for? Doesn’t your sense of freedom chafe at the thought of such a confining ballot?
“Nobody has it as good as the United Coalition…”
Well, isn’t that special!
Roughly 2/3 of the minority party voters in the two districts which graphs were produced for (AD 7 and AD 74) did express a preference between the two candidates of the majority party.
In AD 7, 76% of voters voted for a Democratic candidate in the primary, when there were 3 Democrats and 2 Republicans. Kevin McCarty had a 5% lead over Cohn. He romped to a 17% victory in the general election. There was a high visibility issue regarding the public subsidy of a new basketball arena in Sacramento, that does not have a clear partisan alignment. They also had different opinions on high-speed rail, though both felt more effort should be spent on faster rail service between Sacramento and San Francisco rather than linking southern and northern California. In any event McCarty picked up 2/3 of the change in support.
In AD 74, 65% of voters in the primary voted for one of three Republicans rather than either of two Democrats. Keith Curry had a 3% lead in the primary, but was defeated by Matthew Harper in the general election by 19%. It is not clear whether there were political differences between the two, though Keith Curry opposed beach bonfires. He was mayor of Newport Beach, while Harper was mayor of Huntington Beach. Perhaps Democrats from the much larger Huntington Beach voted geography. Harper received about 3/4 of the vote change in general election.