An initiative is circulating in Massachusetts for a top-two system. See the text here. If the initiative passed, minor parties would almost never be ballot-qualified. Current law says a qualified party is one that polled 3% for any statewide race, or which has registration of 1% of the state total.
No party, other than the Democratic and Republican Parties, has ever held as much as 1% of the registration in Massachusetts. So if the initiative passed, a party could only be ballot-qualified if it could poll 3% for president. And even if it did poll 3% for president, after the next midterm election, it would lose its status.
The chief proponent for the initiative, Jesse Littlewood, told me that his initiative does not lower the difficult petition requirements for candidates because his group was afraid that if the initiative did improve the petition requirements, that would violate the single-subject rule. He also said that he had not heard about any unhappiness with the California top-two system in connection with the 2026 gubernatorial election.
Given the number of national news articles about the subject, many other people likely *have* heard about the current controversies surrounding Top Two in CA, enough to where it will be a major point of opposition against such a system in MA (which is heavily Democrat based on voting trends), so it’s probably not going to pass even if they manage to get it on the ballot.
Being a qualified party now under the current system makes it harder to qualify for every office except presidential.
Massachusetts permits unenrolled candidates to use a “political designation” of up to three words. Also the legislature may propose a substitute.
Yes, which is why minor parties which qualify often run candidates under some other label that’s not qualified until they disqualify again.
The remedy for so much election controversy and litigation is a write-in only voter verifiable general election ballot to recover the rights Americans had prior to the 1890s monopolization of ballot content for elective offices, aka, the U S version of the Australian secret ballot.
No, the remedy is open, not secret, voting without ballots.
Ideally standing count by party with the parties self-forming by voters standing together in the election hall on election night and office holders appointed and replaced at will until the next year’s election by the winning party.
Less ideally, but as a great improvement over the current system, by voice vote to election officials, with results both archived on video and available concurrently as public record to guarantee an accurate count of votes and make verifiable the fact that only eligible voters vote and that each eligible voter only votes once per election.
Any conceivable benefit of secret ballot voting has been rendered moot by modern technology.
Most people now carry cellphones with cameras and videography equipment embedded in it. So, if anyone wants to bribe, blackmail, threaten etc folks into voting a certain way, it’s impossible to effectively police against them requiring said voters to photo and or video themselves filling out and casting their ballots.
The same phones can connect to the internet for both concurrent broadcast and archived footage and the photos and videos can be shared in real time and retrieved later at any time with geolocation and timestamp data attached.
Furthermore, any security involving, say, requiring folks to surrender their phones while they vote can be easily bypasses because absentee mail voting has foolishly been made extremely easy for any and all voters regardless of need.
Top two would probably severely disadvantage the Republican party in Massachusetts as well. They might never win a statewide office again.
Literacy, particularly functional literacy, is increasingly rare among the younger generations, and getting increasingly so at an accelerating late. Thus, any form of voting that’s based on the premise of near-universal functional literacy is going to become increasingly elitist and exclusive over the course of this century.
This will become particularly more and more at odds with the goal many of you claim to adhere to of allowing all adult citizens – or for some of you even children and noncitizens – to vote.
While I don’t share your goal in the latter respect, for reasons previously explained which I’ll explain again if a non-spambot asks, making unusually high levels of academic education the sole criterion of elitism is extremely suboptimal. I have not explained why yet, that I can remember, but will be happy to if a non-spambot shows any sign of curiosity as to why.
There are other benefits of non-secret voting, again previously explained ad nauseam, which I’ll go into again only if a non-spambot asks.
Walter Ziobro: about like in Washington State and California.
IE, they will only win in a tiny minority of legislative districts or when the demoncrats have an unusual screwup.
Then again, it’s already close to being that way in Massachusetts, except that rhinos who would run as demon rats in most other states (commonwealth’s included) sometimes still win statewide office in your state.
The only thing that would change is that those same folks would switch to running as Demon Rats or move.
Given that many of them would move to Florida, where many of them already own second homes, I’d rather not have them move and run here. Y’all can keep them, please.