What Are the Implications of California’s New Primary System?

I was surprised, amid the analysis of Tuesday’s primary results, to read relatively little about the outcome of yet another California referendum. In this one, voters have elected to completely alter the way in which California elections are conducted. From the New York Times:

Under the new law, which takes effect in 2011, all candidates would be listed together for Congressional and statewide elective offices on a primary ballot, and could choose to list their party preference — or no preference at all. The top two vote-getters — even if from the same party — would advance to the general election.

Proposition 14 will allow any voter to cast a ballot for any candidate in primaries, a change that appeals to many independent voters, who now make up 20 percent of the California electorate. Under the current system, in general only registered party members are allowed to vote in primaries, and only for their own party’s candidates. Both Democrats and Republicans allow unaffiliated voters — known in California as “decline to state” voters — to request a primary ballot for their respective contests, but they have to choose one party’s ballot.

And so everything’s going to change, now, and no one seems quite sure how it will turn out. It’s reasonable to guess that in most races, a Democrat and a Republican will get first and second place in the primary, leading to a two-party runoff in the general, but that’s not guaranteed — races in conservative southern California might be between two Republicans, without an option for Democratic voters in the general; while the reverse might be true in liberal northern California. And meanwhile, the not-insignificant number of Californians who vote Green or Libertarian are probably going to miss being able to see their parties on the general-election ballot.

Indeed, the whole proposal makes one wonder what the point is of having two elections now. If the point of the primary is no longer asking members of a given party who should represent them in a given race against the candidates from other parties, why not just get rid of the two-election system and use a single-election system where voters could, e.g., rank their choices from among the wide variety of political parties, à la the European multiparty parliamentary systems? If the traditional American system enfranchises the members of the major parties at the expense of third-party members and independent voters, the new California proposal helps only independent voters, and hurts everyone else. A vote-ranking system could help both independent voters and party members, which is a legitimate concern in California.

From the results of this ballot initiative, it’s pretty clear that Californians see the need for electoral reform, but it seems to me that they’re pretty misguided about what sort of reform exactly their state needs. This new primary system seems pointless and not likely to actually streamline elections — and so maybe it would be more efficacious to fix California politics such that amending the state constitution in complicated ways took just a little more effort than a majority vote absent any expert knowledge of electoral politics and their ramifications.

Emily is a staff writer for Campus Progress. She attends Princeton University.

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