Election Reforms Blocked by Elections

SEVERAL PROPOSED ELECTION reforms on the 2024 ballot offered promising solutions: Reduce the power of partisan primaries, ensure more robust competition in general elections, and increase the likelihood that winning campaigns represent the median voter rather than a lesser-of-two-evils result.

- Eric Boehm

But it seems voters aren't interested in all that.

In November, voters across several Western states defeated a series of ballot measures aimed at overhauling how they select their representatives and how votes in those races are tallied. The results are an undeniable setback for a reform movement that seemed to be gaining steam in recent years. But advocates for these changes say this is not the end.

In Colorado, Idaho, and Montana, voters rejected ballot measures that sought to replace partisan primary elections with a so-called top-four primary, where all candidates compete in a single, nonpartisan primary election and the four highest vote-getters advance to the general election. A similar top-five primary proposal in Nevada was also voted down, and a top-two primary was rejected by voters in South Dakota.

Had they passed, the ballot initiatives in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Nevada would also have adopted ranked choice voting for general elections. In that model, voters are asked to rank their choices (from one through four, for example). If no candidate gets an outright majority on the first ballot, the last-place finisher is eliminated and that candidate's votes are redistributed, based on their voters' second-choice preferences. The process repeats until one candidate secures a majority.