The huge surprise in Colorado elections was the resounding defeat of Proposition 131, the measure aiming to rewrite how we choose elected officials. Supporters spent some $19 million dollars, including $6 million out of the pockets of Kent Thiry, to promote it. Opponents spent less than a million. Yet Thiry was left looking like the Black Knight from Monty Python, declaring the beating left but a scratch. So what happened?
I agree with the usual take: The measure was too complicated, ranked choice voting creates too many openings for problems, and a lot of people understandably were wary about making big changes to election rules in an era when many people (including the president elect) make baseless claims about election fraud (but only when they lose).
But the defeat of 131 doesn’t mean we don’t need election reform. Government gives political parties special privileges, including easier ballot access and taxpayer-funded primaries, and that is immoral and contrary to authentic democracy. Of course most representatives from the two major parties love the current system of party privilege, because it reinforces their power.
How government should run elections
To review, here’s how I think government should handle elections. Forget government-run primaries. If parties want to run and finance their own primaries, great, but that should have nothing to do with ballot access. Alternately, government could run open-access primaries not tied to parties.
Government should set equal rules for all comers for ballot access. If we don’t like paper petitions because they’re harder for people with disabilities, then we can adopt something like online petitions. The point is, the rules should be the same for everyone.
Government should not list party affiliation on the ballot. Nor should government track voters by party affiliation. If you want to join a political party, great, but that’s properly not the concern of government. If parties want to set internal rules for their members seeking office, great, just don’t ask government to enforce those rules.
Whether we have only general elections or primaries too, we face the perpetual problem of similar candidates splitting the vote when three or more candidates appear on the ballot. That’s why I endorse approval voting, meaning that voters can vote for as many candidates as they want. For example, if someone wants to vote for both the Republican and the Libertarian, or for both the Democrat and the Green, great.
With approval voting, the ballots look exactly the same as they do now. If people want to continue to vote only for one candidate, great. By contrast, ranked choice voting, as Thiry advocates, requires huge and confusing changes to the ballot. With such complication comes greater risk of people unintentionally messing up their ballots and disqualifying their own votes. The concerns over ranked choice voting are well-founded.
Where 131 went wrong
Let’s follow the Blue Book to review the problems with 131. The measure continues discriminatory rules that favor parties. The analysis points out, “Unaffiliated candidates collect signatures to qualify for the primary election, rather than the general election. Candidates from political parties still qualify for the primary by collecting signatures or receiving a party nomination.” Again, government should set the same rules for all comers, not treat party members differently.
Prop 131 does nothing to solve the split-vote problem at the primary level. The analysis continues, “All voters, regardless of political party affiliation, receive the all-candidate primary ballot and choose a single candidate for each office in the primary election.” Government doesn’t even need to run primaries, but, if it does run them, it should set equal rules for all and use approval voting.
When it comes to the general election, 131 uses a ranking system with instant runoff tabulation. The analysis explains, “If one candidate gets more than half of the first-place votes, they win the election. If no candidate wins more than half of the first-place votes, the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated and an additional round of counting is conducted. Votes for the eliminated candidate are then counted for the next highest ranked candidate on each ballot, if any. This process continues until a candidate has more than half of the active votes, and wins the election.”
Ranked choice with the instant runoff is needlessly complex and prone to quirks. Under approval voting, by contrast, the winner is simply the candidate who gets the most votes. Simple to understand, simple to implement, no nonsense.
Incidentally, voters in several other states also rejected ranked choice voting, although voters in Washington D.C. embraced it.
Unfortunately, to date, Thiry has chosen to blow millions of dollars and undermine his own credibility rather than listen to reasonable advice on the issue. Colorado voters deserve real election reform. Let’s hope in the future advocates of such reform get things right.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
