Introducing the Public Primary

FairVote is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, tax-exempt, publicly supported organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the IRS Code. Board members act in an individual capacity and not as a representation of any political affiliation. Members’ political affiliations do not constitute an endorsement by FairVote. FairVote does not support, endorse, or oppose any political party or candidate. Any comments made by a board member acting in his/her individual capacity are personal and do not reflect FairVote’s views.

Rob Richie, Executive Director of FairVote believes that every vote should matter and be heard in every public election. The fundamental goal of any Primary election system should be to help foster a General election that will include meaningful choices, real competition, and fair representation. That said, a Primary election system funded by the taxpayers ideally will allow voters real choices among an array of candidates, encourage both positive and inclusive Primary campaigns, and elect or advance winners that are reflective of as many voters as possible.

He highlights a new proposal: the “Public Primary”. First proposed last year by Chad Peace of the Independent Voter Project as an “all independent primary,” the idea has taken more shape in the succeeding months. Chad now calls it a Public Primary.

Here’s how it could work:

- Maintain without change all current ways to get onto the General election ballot. If a party holds a closed Primary contest, it could continue to do so. Ballot access for independents and minor parties would be preserved.

- Establish a new “Public Primary” to take place simultaneously with the party primaries that would be open to any candidate, including some who might be seeking a party nomination, and any voter, including some who might be voting in a Party Primary.

- Advance the winner of the Public Primary to the General election. If any candidate won a Party Primary, that candidate would have to accept the Party nomination and be eliminated from the Public Primary before running the ranked choice voting tally.

- Have candidates on the General election ballot list any nomination they received, just as now. The candidate securing a spot on the General election from the Public Primary would also have the option to indicate a preferred party. So the ballot might read “Jill Lopez, Public Primary. Prefers Republican.”

- Use ranked choice voting in both the “Public Primary” and the General election to accommodate the expected increase in voter choice in those contests. A State ideally would use Ranked-Choice Voting within Party Primaries as well.

When evaluating the idea last year as part of their project assessing the impact of 37 structural reforms, both FairVote and participating scholars suggested it would have relatively low impact. At that point, they interpreted its main value as voters always being able to participate in a government-funded Primary even if unaffiliated or registered with a Party not holding a nominating contest. But his broader definition of the Public Primary proposal suggests it could have a far more significant impact.

Consider the U.S. Senate race in Delaware in 2010. That year, Republican U.S. House Member Mike Castle sought his party’s nomination for an open seat and would have been favored in November if winning the nomination. However, Castle was upset by Christine O’Donnell, a strong backer of the Tea Party, who then was handily defeated in November by the Democratic nominee. If a Public Primary had been available, Castle certainly would have contested it, and likely been its winner, giving him an alternate route to the General election ballot. Similarly, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski would not have needed to mount a write-in campaign after being upset by Joe Miller in the Republican Primary in 2010. Former House majority leader Eric Cantor might have had another chance to win in Virginia in 2014 after losing his House Primary.

The Public Primary is not designed to reward one viewpoint over another. If Cantor had won the Republican nomination in 2014, for example, Dave Brat might have secured a spot in November through the Public Primary and presented voters with an additional choice.

He sees the Public Primary as achieving significant pro-democracy goals, including:

- Every voter could vote in a Primary contest, unlike with the status quo in which a growing number of Americans are excluded from Closed Primaries due to their choice of party affiliation.

- Parties would maintain their freedom of association, and no candidate currently securing a place on the November ballot would be denied that opportunity.

- The General election ballot would usually have a significant number of additional candidates for voters to consider in November, when turnout is higher and more representative.

- Ranked-Choice Voting would avoid split votes and “spoiled elections” for all races with more than two candidates, giving voters greater freedom to consider their favorite candidates and encouraging candidates to reach out beyond their base.

Certainly, the Public Primary is much more in keeping with the traditions of our Founders and the first century of our elections than proposals like the Top-Two Primary that address some problems with our status quo at the expense of limiting voter choice to two in November. As FairVote explain in amicus briefs to the Supreme Court last year in cases challenging Closed Primaries in New Jersey and the Top-Two Primary in California, the United States is virtually alone in paying for Party Primaries, which was begun in the early 1900s. For most of the 19th century, we also did not have a government-printed ballot. In other words, for much our nation’s history, the government did not sanction parties, there was very limited voter registration and there was no question of “ballot access” in November. Rather, parties were private associations that brought people together to organize politically to recruit candidates, nominate them and mobilize voters to support them. They typically asked voters in the General election to use the ballots that the party created that only listed the candidates they supported.

Having the government today use its power to limit who runs in November and to deny showing association on the ballot is problematic, and undercuts Representative Democracy when it limits voter choice and weakens the right of political association.

The “Public Primary” avoids those pitfalls.

FairVote will continuing to develop and hone the “Public Primary” proposal this month before formally recommending it to their Board of Directors as an “innovation” alongside other FairVote backed proposals to revamp our Primaries such as the Top-Four Primary and the Open Ticket system.

CLICK HERE for more information about FaiVote and the “Public Primary”.











NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker

America Should Hold Primaries on One Day

This is from an article in The Economist of August 4th.

The system to select candidates to run for Congress might have been designed with the welfare of journalists and lobby groups in mind.  Primary elections go from March to September, allowing reporters to travel the country eating barbecue with candidates for seven months.

These primaries attract relatively few voters, meaning that well organized lobby groups hold disproportional sway.  Organized labor influences Democratic primaries more than they ought to be the case given that only 11% of workers are union members.  In Republican primaries, relatively small outfits like Club for Growth, which campaigns for smaller government, can make a big splash.

So the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think-tank, believes it has a solution.

The center is proposing we do away with our timetable for primaries, and hold them on the same day.  It thinks that the change would create a media event, a pre-election election, thereby attracting move voters to the polls and giving more power to moderates.  Elaine Kamark of the Brookings Institute, another think-tank, reckons that the two parties, which generally dislike the freakish results that low turnout elections sometime produce might look into this.

The benefits might even outweigh the harm done to the well being of political reporters.

For me, one of the problems of low turnout is the 16 states that have closed primaries (Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wyoming) where only party members can vote.

So states allow the voter to change their registration at the polls so they can get a ballot.  Then there are different options to revert to their independent status, such as at the poll site or at City Hall.

But this still has the problem of having to select a party's ballot removing the voters option to select the candidates of their choice.

I would like to see a Blanket Primary, which is less restrictive then a Top-Two Primary.

In a Blanket Primary, voters may pick one candidate for each office without regard to party lines; for instance, a voter might select a Democratic candidate for governor and a Republican candidate for senator.  In a traditional blanket primary the candidates with the highest number of votes for each office in each party advance to the general election, as the respective party's nominee.  Blanket primaries differ from open primaries – in open primaries voters may pick candidates regardless of their own party registration, but may only choose among candidates from a single party of the voter's choice.  A blanket primary gives registered voters maximum choice in selecting candidates.

With this system, a separate ballot is used to select party positions and only party members can use it.










NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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CA Voters Forgot About the Top-Two Statute

Thanks to Richard Winger from Ballot Access News for the information for this post.

In February 2009, the California legislature, in a all-night session, passed Top-Two Primaries with two bills, one a constitutional amendment to put Top-Two on the June 2010 ballot, and another that was just a statute, and which would only go into effect if the voters approved the Top-Two constitutional amendment.

The Voters Pamphlet only had the text of the proposed constitutional amendment, so the voters did not know what was in the implementing legislation statute.

The statute included:

1. Changing the number of signatures in lieu of filing fee was implicit in the constitutional amendment itself.  Once all candidates were "voter-nominated", and could get signatures in lieu of the filing fee from all registered voters, it would have been obviously unconstitutional to have different numbers of signatures for different kinds of candidates for the same office.  So the Secretary of State issued a regulation saying that from now on, the 10,000 (for statewide office), 3,000 (for US House and State Senate) and 1,500 (for Assembly) apply to all candidates, whereas formerly they only applied to members of parties that had more than 5% of the registration (i.e., Republicans and Democrats).

2. Alternatively, they can pay a filing fee, which ranges from $2,600 to $3,500.  The fee is fixed by state law at “two percent of the first-year salary” of state officeholders and “one percent of the first-year salary” for members of Congress, the Board of Equalization, State Senate and State Assembly.

3. Write-in votes would not be counted.

Before Top-Two, independent candidates didn't need any signatures in lieu of filing fee, because independent candidates needed a ballot access petition just to get on the November ballot, so the law said a signature on an independent petition would be deemed to also count as a signature in lieu of a filing fee.  So, effectively, there was no filing fee for independent candidates.

So the bad stuff was mostly in the implementing legislation statute that the voters didn't vote on and didn't know about when the voted in 2010.

Taking away the label "independent" was part of the implementing legislation passed in 2009.  The implementing legislation had said write-ins could never be counted, but had left write-in space on the ballot.

In 2012 the legislature passed AB 1413, putting that into the law.  AB 1413 took away write-in space from the general election ballot for Congress and state office.

So in 2014, many independent candidates will need many more signatures or larger funding for filing fees, to get on the primary ballot.










NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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NYC Needs a New Way to Vote

I read an article in the New York Daily News by Francis Barry, Mayor Bloomberg’s Director of Public Affairs and the author of “The Scandal of Reform.”  He contends New York City is not a real democracy and explains how the voters can have a serious competition and real choice.

He explains that the voter will find when they get their ballot that nearly all of the races for offices have already been decided.  Their only choice will be whether to rubber stamp the inevitable winners or cast protest votes for fringe candidates.

Voters are stuck in this predicament in part because the local Republican Party has been on life support since the 1970s.  This year, the GOP is contesting a record low number of offices.  For the City Council’s 51 seats, for instance, Republicans have nominated only 29 candidates, leaving nearly half the council uncontested.  And most of those 29 nominees are merely sacrificial lambs who have raised little or no money and will lose in huge landslides.

The GOP is not even bothering to field a candidate for the office of Public Advocate, second-in-line to the mayor.  The last time Republicans won that office was in 1941, when the office was called the City Council President.  Nor has the GOP nominated a candidate for Brooklyn Borough President.  A Republican hasn’t won Brooklyn Borough Hall since 1913.

The lack of electoral competition except on low-turnout primary day may be good for Democratic Party leaders, but not it’s not good for voters.  Only 22% of Democrats voted in the September primary.  When a significantly larger number of Democrats arrive at the polls tomorrow, joined by hundreds of thousands of independents and others who were prohibited from participating in the September primary, they will find they have few viable choices.

Many of tomorrow’s inevitable winners were actually opposed by a majority of primary voters.  In one City Council race, the Democratic primary winner, Helen Rosenthal, received only 26% of the vote.  Three of four Democrats supported someone else.  But in the general election, she will face a token Republican candidate who has not raised a dime.  Like most other Democratic nominees, she effectively stopped campaigning after the primary.  The general election is only a formality.

Election law should be built to benefit voters, not parties.  The existing system benefits parties at the expense of voters.

Mr. Barry's solution is to allow all voters and all candidates equal access to the primary and general elections.  Under such a system, all parties’ candidates would compete in a single primary open to all voters.  The top two vote getters would then advance to the general election, regardless of their party affiliation.

Many cities around the country, along with several states, have moved to this more inclusive form of elections, often called a nonpartisan or “top two” system.  Voters in California recently adopted such a system.

Here in New York City, more competition at the polls would mean higher voter turnout. Expanding access to the polls to independents (about one in five voters) would make it harder for party bosses to control election outcomes.  And that would help make it easier for new immigrant groups, which party organizations are traditionally slow to embrace, to elect representatives of their communities.

But there are other options to Top-Two.  There is the option of a Blanket Primary.  A primary in which the ballot is not restricted to candidates from one party.  My version would have each party’s candidate with the most votes move to the General Election.  To overcome the party association issue, some states allows parties to opt-out of this process and run their closed primary.

Today many voters have declared their independence and say they want to vote for the candidates and not the party. In many states where they can not take part in the primary voting process, they ask “why are my taxes paying for the candidate selection process of private entities called political parties?”

In New York City, we could create a primary ballot for independents, or as some are called: no party preference or blanks, and include all the candidates running in the primary process for each position.  The candidates with the most votes for each position would then appear on the Independent ballot line in the General Election.

In New York, where we use Fusion voting, the candidate’s vote on the Independent ballot line would be added to the total vote the candidate gets on the other ballot lines they appear on.

The absence of serious competition and real voter choice that will define tomorrow’s election should not be shrugged off as if nothing can be done.  Practical solutions exists, and voters in New York City whose diversity of ethnicity and opinion embodies the best traditions of American democracy, deserve a better election process.










NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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