- illustration by Mark Markovich
Initiative Petition 55, the business-funded ballot measure looking to bring so-called “top-two” primary elections to Oregon, is pretty firmly on track for the fall ballot—thanks to nearly half a million dollars in spending and some 140,000 submitted petition signatures.
The idea goes something like this: Primary ballots in Oregon would become free-for-alls, featuring candidates from every party all at the same time. And the two top vote-getters, regardless of party, would advance to a fall runoff. In a perfect world (and our world decidedly is not), turnout would increase and gridlock would ease.
But if reformers had their way several months ago, IP 55 (written up in this week’s paper) would have remained the understudy to a measure even more ambitious: Initiative Petition 54, a measure that not only would have championed a top-two primary system, but also would have let Oregonians cast votes for as many candidates as they liked.
That extra wrinkle is known as “approval voting.” It was seen as an antidote to some of the potential side effects of a top-two system: vote-splitting and political chicanery. But much to the chagrin of its most vociferous backer, the people who would have been called on to fund IP 54 couldn’t get past the notion that it was a step too far for most voters.
“I went to the folks who funded open primaries before,” says Frohnmayer, the businessman son of a former Oregon attorney general. “They were supportive.”
Some of them still are, at least privately. But the sales pitch just got to be a bit too hard.
“There was some calculus that went on,” says Frohnmayer.
Jim Kelly, the Rejuvenation founder and Portland ex-pat, who’s done much of the bankrolling of IP 55 from his ranch out in Grant County, confirms he was one of those early supporters—albeit with concerns that adding “approval voting” was too radical. Washington and California both have top-two systems, but neither opens their ballots to multiple markings.
“I called him up,” Kelly says of Frohnmayer. “I was excited to see he was out there doing something.”
Kelly also says he could see that Frohnmayer was going to need help raising money. So he agreed to line up cash, he says, leaving Frohnmayer as the chief petitioner of IP 54, so long as IP 55 was drafted alongside it as a clean top-two backup. He and Kaiser executive Brett Wilcox both dove in.
“We were really pushing 54 with 55 as the backup,” Kelly says. “That was the idea at the time. I still think it’s a good idea, the approval voting.”
They wound up running into what Kelly described as a “brick wall.” No one wanted to pay up for an initiative they weren’t sure would be a winner.
“It was too weird, I guess,” Kelly says. And in campaign fundraising, “if you give someone an excuse to say no, they’ll say no. We told Mark we can’t do this. There’s no way to raise the money.”
That didn’t stop Frohnmayer. Though Kelly and Wilcox moved onto IP 55—which attracted bundles of business money—he stuck it out with a volunteer operation, hoping people would print signature-collection worksheets and pass them out themselves. That way, at least, people knew about it. And maybe, if enough people heard about “approval voting,” Frohnmayer says, the legislature might amend IP 55 once and if voters approve it.
Without it, he says, elections won’t look all that much different under a top-two system. Voters will still pick the most “electable” candidate—meaning the candidate with the most money and institutional support. And that will deter people, in turn, from ever seeking out office. In California, a couple of years ago, four Democrats in a Democratic district split the vote so thoroughly that two Republicans advanced. The lesson was not to run so many candidates, Frohnmayer says—not exactly a healthy recipe for a participatory democracy.
He insists the math would work better—for lesser candidates and minor parties—if voters can choose electable candidates as well as the candidates they actually deeply believe in.
And without all that, he thinks turnout will remain low—a problem that’s dogged California and Washington, despite the hopes of top-two backers.
“You can finally vote on the candidate, not on which party stronghold the candidate calls home,” he says.
Representatives of smaller parties remain deeply skeptical. Seth Woolley, local treasurer for the Pacific Green Party of Oregon says the math will still favor “electable” candidates, since everyone will be choosing those candidates as a hedge against their personal choices.
“The top two candidates are guaranteed to represent the majority party in their area,” Woolley says.
It’s all moot anyway. The July 3 deadline to turn in signatures and qualify for the fall ballot has come and gone.
“The business community is not funding it,” Frohnmayer says. “They have chosen a system that maintains and magnifies the vote-splitting.”
Why not just move to Instant Runoff Voting.
Both I-54 and I-55 assume the much larger and more representative electorate should only be bothered with two candidates in each race – -and just the two with the most support in that small electorate. That not representative democracy as our founders conceived it.
The current system is not worth defending either, however. Let’s open up the general election by advancing more candidates and using ranked choice voting — or, better yet, open up representation with multiseat districts and proportional representation (as in the fair voting plans at http://www.fairvoting.us).
Instant Runoff Voting (the ranked system FairVote’s Rob Richie refers to) is widely understood by experts to be the poorest of the five commonly discussed alternative voting methods. For example, it can punish voters for ranking their favorite candidate in 1st place! Here’s a brief video explaining this, by a math PhD who did his thesis on the mathematics of voting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
Score Voting and Approval Voting are two much simpler systems that are mathematically guaranteed to never punish you for supporting your favorite candidate. Here’s a comparison between Approval Voting and IRV.
http://www.electology.org/approval-voting-vs-irv
Richie is on the right track with Proportional Representation. PR would virtually eliminate Gerrymandering, and would go a long way toward addressing the severe underrepresentation of women, minorities, and minor parties in our legislative bodies…
However, PR doesn’t apply to single-winner executive posts such as mayor or governor. And it is very hard to enact PR in a two-party-dominated environment—since it would instantly take something like 30% of the seats away from the D’s and R’s. Much more practical is to loosen the two-party stranglehold by enacting Score Voting or Approval Voting as an intermediate step. By making it 100% safe to vote for your favorite candidate, regardless of “electability”, these systems will have a much stronger tendency to elect independent and minor party candidates, who will presumably be much more open to PR. Ranked voting methods such as IRV unfortunately suffer from tactical exaggeration which causes them to maintain two-party domination. They sound interesting in theory, but in reality, they don’t deliver.
Clay Shentrup
Co-founder, The Center for Election Science
The top two primary is a very bad idea. Oregon voters recognized that when they defeated the same measure in 2008 (Measure 65) by an overwhelming vote of 66-34%. Top-two blanket primaries are intended to make political party labels meaningless, thus depriving voters of the most important single piece of information that most voters rely upon in making their decisions on candidates. They also allow complete strangers to hijack the names of all parties on the ballot, including minor parties (which Petition 55 actually destroys, thus reducing the choices available on all ballots). The “new” measure is 99.9% the same as Measure 65 of 2008 (and is exactly the same in all meaningful respects), the information at http://saveoregonsdemocracy.org is very relevant, particularly http://saveoregonsdemocracy.org/danmeek.html
In response to Dan Meek:
> Top-two blanket primaries are intended to make political party labels meaningless
Here’s what Measure 55 is intended to do:
“Statement of intent. The intent of the Open Primary Act of 2014 is
to create a fully open, equitable, and fair election system, that will be applied to specific
federal and state elected offices currently elected on a partisan basis. This Act will
abolish the current practice of relying on political party members or party officials in
closed primary elections or conventions to nominate candidates for these offices — while
prohibiting the participation of non-affiliated voters entirely — and replace it with a
system through which all Oregon electors may participate on an equal basis, in all phases
of the selection process. This specifically means changing the current system of
primary election contests for these offices so that all Oregon voters have the equal ability
to select two finalist candidates to appear on the general election ballot, regardless of the
political party affiliation, or lack of party affiliation, of the elector or candidate.”
Source: http://goo.gl/ntMGRW
This is completely different than the intent of the 2008 measure, and that has important ramifications for how the resulting law will be constructed if the measure passes.
Here’s more about the definition of an “equal vote”.
http://www.unifiedprimary.org/equalvote
The operative text of IP 55 is 99+% the same as Measure 65 of 2008 and is the same in all material respects. The vague statement of intent does not change the operative language of the measure. Courts enforce the operative language. Also, nothing in the statement of intent negates anything I have said about the operative language of IP 55. You then offered a link to a website about the Unified Primary, which also is not IP 55.