Election Reforms Blocked by Elections
Ranked choice voting and nonpartisan primaries suffered a bad election cycle in 2024.
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.
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.
Other ballot initiatives to implement ranked choice voting were defeated in Arizona and Oregon. Yet voters in Washington, D.C., overwhelmingly approved a ranked choice ballot measure. That might say something about how this idea has germinated within the electorate: It is widely accepted by policy wonks and others who spend a lot of time thinking about politics but is viewed skeptically by many run-of-the-mill voters.
Supporters of those changes believe that abolishing partisan primaries and ensuring that general election winners have majority support will shift the equation for successful campaigns. Rather than rewarding only candidates who can appeal to the fringes of the two major parties in low-turnout primaries, an open primary would create more paths for candidates to reach the general election—and winners would have to appeal to the broadest cross-section of voters.
Imagine a district where Republicans easily outnumber Democrats. Under the current system in most states, whichever candidate wins the GOP primary will be an overwhelming favorite in the general election—even if he or she would not be the choice of most voters in the district, but only becomes so in comparison with the one other candidate from the opposing party. In a top-four or top-five primary, that candidate would be unable to capture one of the major parties' valuable labels and would have to win a general election against a slate of opponents that might include one or two other Republicans, a Democrat, and perhaps a third party candidate as well.
The outcome might be the same in the end, but the process would give voters in that district a more competitive set of choices in November.
"At the end of the day, democracy can't endure if our elections continue to be controlled by the fringes of both political parties in low-turnout party primaries," says Nick Troiano, executive director of Unite America, a nonprofit that has pushed for reforms such as ranked choice voting and open primaries. According to a recent study the group published, about 87 percent of congressional races in 2024 were effectively determined by the 7 percent of eligible voters who voted in primary elections—largely because partisan gerrymandering has rendered many congressional elections noncompetitive in general elections.
Political parties are less enthusiastic about changes that could reduce their ability to control the election process. In Nevada and Montana most prominently, state-level parties campaigned hard against the proposed changes.
Sticking to the status quo of partisan primaries does nothing to address the underlying problem of "primaries that serve as a bottleneck, keeping many of the candidates with the broadest appeal and best qualifications off the general election ballot," says Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, who supports these changes. "I don't think people want to leave this problem unaddressed. So I think we'll hear more about this relatively measured and sensible reform idea."
Troiano says Unite America is not ready to give up on improving America's elections. "Every successful movement from history, from marriage equality to women's suffrage, faced setbacks," he says. "They didn't give up, and neither will we."
