Anyone can listen to this webinar on the California top-two system, by clicking on this link. It was conducted on June 7, two days after the California primary. It was scheduled to start at noon, and it did start at noon, but Steve Peace had been misinformed about the starting time, so he didn’t join until twenty minutes after the event had started. But both had equal time. The event lasted 43 minutes, and was sponsored by Ballotpedia.
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the webinar is that Steve Peace declared his support for changing top-two to top-four, combined with ranked choice voting. Peace is the lead author of the California top-two system law, and is co-founder of the Independent Voters Project. Peace also said he favors restoring write-in space on general election ballots.
On June 13, the Independent Voters Project announced that it now favors top-four instead of top-two. IVP also wants to use ranked choice voting in conjunction with a top-four system. See this story.
NO primaries
PR and AppV
There were 12 or 13 offices on the June primary ballot throughout the state: 9 statewide races, and 3 or 4 district races, depending if there was a senate race. There were also local races. Orange County had 7 countywide races, and two more in some districts.
A voter would have had to rank from 19 to 22 races. That is 76 to 88 rankings. That is ludicrous.
Legislative Bodies–
CANDIDATE rank order lists of the other LB candidates.
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ALL paper mail ballots – Oregon survives
More parts of the Democracy Amdt.
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PR and AppV
Jim, you make a good point. However there were 8 partisan statewide races. I haven’t heard anyone say they would extend ranked choice voting to nonpartisan office.
Why would they not extend IRV to non-partisan offices? Currently in California, IRV is only used for non-partisan races. Shouldn’t all statewide offices other than Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General be non-partisan (or non-elective)? Maine only has one state elective office. Aren’t you a bit embarrassed to have a SOS who when given the opportunity at the SOS debate in 2014 to explain why he should be SOS, was to help Dianne Feinstein pass the $15 minimum wage?
The reason Democrats did not have a candidate on the general election ballot in Assembly District 76 in 2012, 2014, and 2016, is that they did not have a candidate on the primary ballot in 2012, 2014, and 2016.
In 2012 there were three Republican candidates in the primary. Rocky Chavez was elected in a general election in which the district was evenly split between Romney and Obama. Chavez had a personal advantage as USMC Colonel (Ret) in a district that includes Camp Pendelton. Even if we assume that every voter who skipped the Assembly race had voted for Obama, it is clear that Chavez prevailed in the general election with the backing of Obama voters. In other words, Top 2 worked to elect the more moderate candidate.
In 2014 and 2016, Chavez was the only candidate on the primary election ballot. The second Republican candidate qualified as a write-in, in 2014 with a few dozen votes, and in 2016 with a few 100 votes. Running as an opponent of Sacramento, Tom Krouse was unlikely to draw votes from ordinary Democrats. Only a few cynical Democrat leaders would vote for him in hopes of defeating an easier opponent in the future. Had Chavez run for re-election in 2018, he would have easily been re-elected, even if Democrats ran a candidate.
Your spiel would not be so convincing if you started with, “the district is so Republican that Hillary Clinton carried it by 13 points” or “the district is so Republican that registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans”. Over the past few decades, Democrats very rarely would knock off an incumbent Republican, but would take an open seat. Term limits may have worked against Republicans.
In 2018, the majority of voters supported the two Democratic candidates, even though Democrats typically are less likely to vote in primaries (if a majority could elect in the primary, the Republicans would have picked up two seats), and more candidates means more votes for a party (some voters will vote on characteristics other than party, whether it is race, ethnicity, sex, locality, etc.). It is possible that the Democrats exploited a mentally unstable woman to knock a few percentage points off the Republican leader.
The registration in that district is virtually tied between the Republican and Democratic Parties. And for decades, it has been a truism in California that if the Republicans have even 80% as many registered voters as Democrats, it is a Republican-leaning district. Republicans vote at a significantly higher rate than Democrats, in California.
As to the 2018 primary vote, Republicans were just a hair under the Demoratic vote total in the 76th. We can’t make a definitive statement yet about vote totals because there are still 1,000,000 uncounted votes in California.
I would propose a new electoral system. Give each voters one vote. Let them vote for as many candidates as they like. If no majority, eliminate the candidates with the least votes and have those votes’ values be reallocated to the remaining candidates. Continue until one candidate gets a majority.
So, If you vote for more than one candidate, each candidate will get 1/n votes, with n being the number of candidates preferred. This would eliminate the spoiler effect and would allow for coalition building. I do know some voters will still vote for only one candidate but there are so many swing voters that would like to vote for a major party and a third party.
Derek —
Condorcet = RCV/IRV correctly done — with YES/NO tiebreaker —
BUT computer voting required in all larger elections.
@DR,
Computers should not be permitted to vote, much less required to do so, regardless of the size of the election.