Statewide efforts to adopt open and nonpartisan primaries, as well as ranked choice voting, failed in this year’s election, delivering a stinging setback to the election reform movement.
The measures sought to reduce political polarization in U.S. politics. And while an overwhelming share of Americans say they are unhappy with the country’s democratic systems, these initiatives were voted down in states across the country this week.
“The status quo won this year,” said Deb Otis, director of research and policy at FairVote, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for ranked choice voting and other electoral reforms. “The pro-democracy ballot measures, including anti-gerrymandering reform and open primary-only initiatives, tended to do worse than expected at the ballot.”
Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and South Dakota had ballot measures that would have replaced party primaries with nonpartisan contests and/or created a ranked choice voting system in their elections. A majority of those measures sought to implement both.
An effort to move to an independent redistricting commission in Ohio lost. And a measure to repeal nonpartisan primaries and ranked choice voting in Alaska remains too close to call.
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In nonpartisan primaries, all candidates, regardless of party, appear on the same ballot and some number of candidates, like the "top four" vote-getters, move on to the general election. Proponents of primary reform say partisan elections often exclude independent and unaffiliated voters — and simultaneously bolster more extreme candidates who mainly appeal to a party’s base, likely exacerbating polarization.
Both nonpartisan primaries and ranked choice voting, advocates say, force candidates to appeal to voters who are outside of their base — which could potentially foster more bipartisanship.
Opponents of these kinds of measures — which are chiefly the two main political parties — say nonpartisan primaries strip power away from parties to control who can vote in their elections. They also argue that big changes to the way elections are run, including ranked choice voting, can confuse voters.
Nick Troiano — founding executive director of Unite America, a philanthropic venture fund that invests in nonpartisan electoral reform — said pushback from the Democratic and Republican parties really hurt the 2024 measures.
“I think these initiatives were largely swept up in a highly polarized climate in which any suggestions of changing voter rules were met with suspicion among voters,” he said. “And then that's amplified by the fact that you have both political parties and their aligned special interests fighting tooth and nail against these initiatives and planting doubt among voters.”
The election reform efforts generally were well funded, but voters seemed skeptical.
Dorothy Wesley, a Democratic voter in Nevada, voted against Amendment 3. She said the measure “was doing too much.” Wesley said voters currently have the freedom to vote however they want and she wasn’t sure why anyone “came up with this.”
“It just seemed to [pop up] all of a sudden,” she said. “And it wasn't clear. So, if I'm not clear and I don't understand it, I'm going to say no.”
Troiano said his group is “disappointed, of course,” but he said there’s a lot to learn from the failure of these measures.
“We've learned that we have to simplify our message in terms of explaining exactly what these reforms are and the benefit to voters,” he said. “And I think we've also learned that we have to communicate more about why these reforms will lead to a positive impact on the issues that people do care about.”
Ranked choice voting did have some wins at the local level
Otis said a bright spot for the electoral reform movement, though, was in cities across the country, like Oak Park, Ill., and Bloomington, Minn.
“We are really excited about the city wins this November, including Washington, D.C., where we won in all eight wards of the city,” she said.
Voters in Washington, D.C., approved a measure that will open up primaries to unaffiliated voters and implement ranked choice voting, allowing voters to rank five candidates in order of preference for most offices on the ballot.
Otis said there are a couple of reasons these reforms did better on a city level. For one, campaigning for the city-level measures was more effective.
“Seeing a television ad might not be quite enough,” she said. “In smaller locations, there were great ground games where campaign volunteers got to talk to voters and share their enthusiasm about this reform.”
And secondly, Otis said “city elections don't always have the same level of partisanship as these statewide” elections.
“I think that makes folks more willing to try out this reform without the worry that possibly it could harm one side or the other,” she said.
Troiano said that despite the fact that these measures failed on a state level, this election was “a big step forward for the election reform movement.”
“We always knew it would be an uphill battle,” he said, “but the fact that it got on the ballot in as many states as it did and then won over six and a half million votes from voters in those states, means we've really started a national conversation about what it means to fix our political system at a systemic level.”
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