Election Law Changes on the Ballot

This fall, quite a few states will have electoral reforms on the ballot, mostly one or more of ranked-choice voting (RCV), open primaries, and explicitly making it illegal for non-citizens to vote.

The third strikes me as so commonsensical that I'm wondering Isn't that already against the law?

The first two are more interesting, and attempt to address a blatant problem caused by the way the two-party system operates, namely that closed primaries make certain party factions disproportionately strong, leading to elections in which one or both parties fields a candidate with very narrow appeal to the general electorate.

While the overall current state of our politics is a direct result of our cultural deterioration, I am inclined to believe that the entrenched two-party system worsens the problem by putting each party under the thumb of its worst elements, by making it too easy to ignore centrist or pro-liberty voters.

But inclined is the key here: As I have said of ranked-choice voting in the past, I can see these measures being band-aids, too:

Image by Elliott Stallion, via Unsplash, license.

[M]ost voters are not just ignorant, but have been dulled by decades of welfare statism and pressure group warfare to the point that they basically sell their votes at election time.

The end result might be that, yes, the Matt Gaetzes and Rashida Tlaibs get eliminated from Congress, but eventually get replaced by smoother operators who can nonconfrontationally pass very bad legislation that "everybody" likes.

Consider this thought experiment: Imagine George Washington winning a modern election -- or Glenn Youngkin winning one during revolutionary times -- even with RCV. I can't, because the electorate has changed so much.

My apprehension about the "smooth operator" stems in part from how similar the two parties look to me today. Neither challenges the welfare state. Neither has a coherent (let alone pro-America) foreign policy. Neither speaks of individual rights. They look different only on exactly how they'll violate our rights. Sooner or later, someone will find a way to do so in a way that is popular across the board.

No election protocol can be well-designed enough to protect a diseased body politic from itself.

Another concern shows up courtesy of Alaska, which already has RCV and open primaries -- and will consider returning to the old system. That state elected a Democrat as representative due to pathological behavior in its particular RCV system when Nick Begich III, whom a majority preferred to his two opponents, lost anyway.

I don't know enough about RCV to know whether such results can be avoided in the future, but if they can, they need to be, given that the whole point would seem to be that the majority can elect its preferred candidate.

-- CAV