The Nevada Current has this story about the top-five initiative that will soon be circulating in Nevada.
Like other initiatives for top-two, top-four, and top-five, this one eliminates the easier method for a party to remain ballot-qualified. If the Nevada initiative became law, parties could no longer stay on the ballot by polling 1% of the statewide vote for any office. The vote test would shrink down to just president, and there would be no vote test at all in midterm years.
So far, all attempts to persuade top-anything proponents to address the problem have failed. One leader of the top-anything movement communicated via e-mail that it is “too late” to fix this problem in the group’s Missouri initiative.
NOOOO primaries.
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PR
APPV
TOTSOP
Try Top Six/Level the Playing Field!
Again, if I may.
If all six of the significant parties in America that cover the entire political spectrum had full ballot access, or very near, THEN:
All six would become viable-possibly could win, as the polling leveled out, TO:
Green left/progressive 27%, Constitution right nationalist 27%, Democrat left leaning centrist 17%, Republican right leaning centrist 17%, Libertarian right with left tendencies 13%, Reform/Alliance centrist x/unknown/variable%.
Since the Democrat and Republican parties nearly always get full ballot access on all ballots, it may come down to
the four other parties helping each other get on all ballots with full ballot access.
Or possibly legislation, ballot initiative, Court ruling/Order, Constitutional Amendment.
MORE/LESS/just right — control freak govt. ???
commie/fascist factions ???
3 x 2 = 6
it is time to break ALL “political party” labels and candidates! This initiative appears to do that!OPen primary, and “Top 5″ ranked-choice”!
Looks good! I hope it qualifies!
Let individual candidates qualify for the presidential election. If the “Democratic Party” wishes to help Joe Biden to qualify they can.
That would actually helped the better known and financed Democrats and Republicans and hurt third parties and lesser known Democrats and Republicans. Why? Incumbents, wealthy candidates, candidates having the support of big party political machines, candidates who are considered important and given the most coverage by media with wide reach, and candidates with superwealthy supporters who figure out how to finance them through PACs and so on….have a lot more ability to inform voters of what their party and issue stances are. Candidates with a lot fewer resources are much more reliant on their party name being besides their name on the ballot to help communicate what they stand for to voters thanks to the cumulative efforts of their fellow party members over the years in building up some level of brand recognition.
This works much less well, if at all, when any candidate can choose any party label, thus rendering those labels meaningless for parties which are too small to defend their brand effectively. It also doesn’t work very well when X numbers of candidates advance to a final round which would take place even if one candidate wins a majority in the first round. Under those rules, many voters can safely assume that they don’t have to pay much attention to the candidates until the field gets narrowed down.
This is especially true if the first round continues to be called a “primary” and take place during a time of year when most voters are not tuned in. But those concerns are secondary. The most important issues are 1) whether a party label appears on the ballot at all; if it doesn’t, third parties are at a big disadvantage for reasons I stated above; 2) If the parties can control who uses their ballot label. If they can’t, this hurts smaller parties a lot more than it hurts bigger parties, for reasons explained above, 3) If the first round can actually elect someone without an additional round taking place. If it can’t, it is not a real election, just a qualifying round for the real election that most voters can and will ignore, particularly in regards to lesser known candidates with no ballot label or a meaningless ballot label that could easily be deceptive. If it can, it’s a real election, and a subsequent round if there is one can be considered a runoff.
Can any aspect of the Eu v San Francisco precedent be applied to this issue? It seems like the equal associational rights of small parties are being denied.
Probably not. There have already been a bunch of different lawsuits about that. So far at least, the courts have allowed it.