Last week, I attended a Republican candidate forum at Kleffner Ranch in East Helena. Candidates spoke to many issues, but Constitutional Initiative (CI) 126, which would dramatically change how primary elections work in the state of Montana, received special attention.
The consensus of the candidates in the room, echoing the state Republican Party, criticized CI-126 as an attempt to implement ranked choice voting — a system in which voters rank their preferences among a group of candidates, with the winner determined by the weights assigned to each rank.
CI-126, which is still in the petition stage, wouldn’t really do that, but it’s bad for other reasons. CI-126 would create open primaries. Open primaries are just that: open! All registered candidates are presented on a single ballot, regardless of party affiliation, and the four candidates who receive the most votes move on to the general election. No more party specific primaries would be held, but candidates would still have their party affiliations marked on primary ballots.
CI-126 is backed by Montanans for Election Reform, a bi-partisan group that claims open primaries give voters the freedom to vote for the best candidates. I think it actually takes options away from voters.
Consider Bozeman, or Butte, or any district in Montana with a votership consistently and enduringly loyal to either party. In such places, through open primaries, the less popular party could effectively be removed, indefinitely, from participation in general elections.
Or, consider cases where a Republican candidate manages to reach the general election among three Democratic competitors. Should the vote be split between the three Democratic candidates, in a Democratic district, the Republican might win with an extremely small percentage of the total vote share. Or vice-versa.
Montana is presently a plurality state, where the winning candidate only needs to win the most votes, but CI-126’s sister initiative, CI-127, seeks to change that, too. CI-127 would require the winning candidate to receive 50% of the total votes, and, should it be passed with CI-126, would effectively force run-off elections to determine election outcomes.
This also seems to me as a manipulation. Voters would need to vote repeatedly in the run-offs in order to make themselves heard, which could potentially filter out those who will not or cannot participate in a lengthy election process.
The most significant problems with these initiatives is that they potentially remove the ability for voters to vote for their district’s opposition and also make voting much harder. Should a single party occupy the entire slate of general election candidates, voters will not be able to express dissatisfaction with the party by voting for the opposition past the primary election season. This takes pressure off our elected officials, and might, in fact, create party-specific fiefdoms in Montana where voters are effectively forced to choose between voting for a certain party or not voting at all.
I am reminded of an essay by Scott Alexander Siskind, a psychiatrist and rationalist blogger, titled “Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism.” The essay describes a core problem of the ancient world: until the dawn of liberalism, the culture, and the geography, you were born into ultimately determined huge swaths of your behavior and life outcomes, without any meaningful way to select into a system better suited to you, individually.
Part of the beauty of the American system is that we are constantly fighting with and changing one another, and that we have the freedom to move freely between jurisdictions and policymakers competing with one another for our support. Should you be unable to move physically, that competition happens before you in each election cycle. The guaranteed representation of the opposing party in general elections gives us power over our elected officials, and forces them to more seriously acquiesce to our concerns and criticisms. CI-126 threatens this.
