By Daniel Ordorica
Blanket Primaries or Ranked-Choice? Why Not Both?
A substantial number of Americans continue to voice dissatisfaction with current American electoral practices. This has put Justice Brandeis’s laboratories of democracy to work by prompting some states to exercise their powers to design election systems to experiment with various electoral reforms. Those powers derive from the state constitutions for elections of state officers; Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution to “[prescribe] the Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives”, and the U.S. Constitution Article II, Section 1 to determine how electors for President may be chosen.
Many states have allowed their municipalities to experiment, with a few states adopting reforms on a state-wide level. In the latter category, some states, like California and Washington, have adopted what is sometimes described as the top-two, blanket, or Louisiana primary, while Maine has implemented ranked-choice voting. While these reforms have been innovative, study of their effects reveals limited success in achieving advocates’ promises. This post concludes that by combining both reforms, states will be better positioned to access the positive outcomes hoped for.
Blanket Primaries
Former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, Mickey Edwards, has argued that the problem with American politics is our 
broken election system that rewards partisanship at the expense of good policy. Edwards argues that the culprit is the primary. Primary election turnout is notoriously low, with a recent Pew Research Center study celebrating a surge in participation in the 2018 House primary elections of 56% – a surge that still left turnout in that primary under 20%. The belief is that since political participation in primaries is so low, they are dominated by the most active, and most partisan, members of the parties, limiting the success of more centrist candidates, who are presumably more representative of their districts. In particularly politically active years, incumbents are at risk of being “primaried” by extremists in their party. Thus, the candidates in the general election tend to be more extreme, on both ends, than the district, and the eventual winner is then likely to represent only one extreme, rather than the district as a whole.
To address this concern, Edwards advocates for a reform known as “blanket” primaries, sometimes referred to as “Louisiana,” “jungle,” or, most accurately, “top two” primaries. This reform provides that in the primary election, there is a single ballot, with all candidates on the ballot regardless of party. The top-two candidates who receive the most votes then move on to the general election. This means that the candidates in the general election may both be from the same party, particularly in districts whose residents heavily identify with one party over the other. This may make for more competitive general elections, in that a candidate who is almost certain not to win isn’t on the ballot, in favor of a candidate who actually has a chance of convincing voters to vote for them. Also, along with Edwards’s hope that this will reduce partisanship by ensuring the candidates in the general election better represent the center of the district, advocates have also claimed that it will increase turnout.
Unfortunately, the data provides only marginal support for the proposition that blanket primaries reduce partisanship and increase turnout. An added challenge to blanket primaries is that because only the top-two move on, it is subject to vote splitting – if too many candidates from a party enter the race, they may end up without any candidates in the general simply by virtue of the number of candidates in the race, rather than voter preferences. Thus, blanket primaries are not a panacea, at least on their own, for electing more representative representatives.
Ranked-Choice Voting
Maine State House
Augusta, 1832
Maine has moved in a different direction, adopting ranked-choice voting (“RCV”), a darling of electoral reform advocates for decades. RCV has a long pedigree, first having been promoted publicly in the United States by William Robert Ware in the 1870s. Some states and municipalities flirted with a version of RCV, known as single transferable vote, in the last great shift in party power during the early- to mid-twentieth century. RCV and similar systems have also been successfully used internationally – including in Australia, and Ireland.
While there are many different iterations of ranked-choice voting, Maine has adopted the most typical approach. There, voters may rank candidates first, second, third, and so on. If a candidate gets a majority of first-rank votes, they are declared the winner. However, if no candidate receives a majority of votes, then the candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated, and the voters who ranked that candidate first have their votes redistributed to their second-rank candidates. If no candidate has a majority, the new candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated, and their voters’ ballots are also redistributed. The system continues until a candidate has secured a majority of preferences.
Advocates of ranked-choice have also claimed that the system reduces partisanship, since candidates are encouraged to appeal to voters to rank them second, even if they can’t secure their first preference. Advocates also argue that it increases turnout by
https://psmag.com/
making the ballot more reflective of voters’ wishes. As with blanket primaries, however, there is only modest statistical data showing that the turnout hopes are borne out.
A Proposal
States should consider merging the two systems, blanket primaries and RCV, in order to best access the benefits of each. The real problem that neither system effectively can address is the issue of turnout. Primary elections typically draw the most politically aware sector of the electorate that is most invested in who the candidates in the general election are, but turnout remains exceedingly low regardless of the system. Blanket primaries attempt to appeal to an electorate disenchanted by the current partisan model and looking to elect “the best candidate,” but since they continue to rely on a two-stage electoral model, they don’t resolve the fundamental problem. The most partisan members of the electorate participate in the blanket primary, and turnout surges, as it always does, in the general, after the partisans have already selected who will be on the ticket. Combining ranked-choice with the blanket primary would allow there to be a single election, ensuring the highest number of voters considering all the available candidates, not just those the partisans have already selected. Moving to a single election, with candidates on a single ballot regardless of party, and using RCV would ensure that the larger electorate would be able to weigh-in, allow them to rank their preferences, and ensure that the candidate who emerged was the preferred candidate of a majority of voters. This will increase elected officials’ mandate, and provide more information about what direction the district would like to go in.
Dan Ordorica
Of Migration and Refugees: The Failure of Republican Deterrence Policy
Despite two years of the Trump administration’s get-tough-on-refugees policy, the latest statistics continue to show record numbers of migrants crossing the U.S. border, with “16,658 family members in September, the highest one-month total on record and an 80 percent increase from July.” This is just the latest in the periodic reports showing that Trump’s immigration policy has failed, which should prompt questions both about why it has failed, as well as why Trump continues to insist on such a patently immoral approach to policy. Since at least 2014, Republicans have pushed for draconian treatment of border-crossers on the theory that such treatment will deter people from entering the United States. However, deterennce ignores the reasons why people are fleeing their home countries, and thus predictably fails, suggesting that the G.O.P. has adopted the policy in order to appeal to a segment of the voting public whose fear and hate have been amplified by right-wing propaganda.
Shortly after taking office, Trump quickly began to make good on his campaign promises to get tough on immigration, reversing what he termed Democrats’ soft approach. These policies included the end of Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the end of Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of people, and the implementation of harsh treatment of immigration detainees at the border, including family separation, prolonged detention of asylum-seekers, the use of prisons as “detention” facilities, and a concentration of resources to increase prosecute border-crossers (and significant evidence of over-enforcement). The goal of such policies is apparently rooted in a belief that such policies will deter migrants from attempting to enter the United States, notwithstanding the lack of evidence that such deterrence is effective.
BBC.Com
These policies should be seen as derivative of the rhetoric of Republican critics of President Obama’s initial response to the so-called “surge” of children crossing the border in 2014. In early June, Obama originally declared the situation a “humanitarian crisis” and directed officials to apprehend and provide care, including housing and medical treatment, and legal aid. However, with right-wing propaganda outlets such as The Daily Caller whipping up fear of the children at the border, Republican politicians seized on the opportunity to make the humanitarian crisis into a political one. Claiming the crisis was due a failure of the Obama administration, politicians such as House Judiciary Chair Robert Goodlatte suggested that the solution was simply an end to “Obama’s lax immigration enforcement policies” and rigorous enforcement of the immigration laws. And, by the end of June, the Obama administration, feeling the pressure from the right, shifted gears and adopted a policy of deterrence. This crackdown included increased enforcement and wide-spread use of detention centers, as well as an information campaign “to send a clear message to potential migrants so that they understand the significant dangers of this journey and what they will experience in the United States.” This created little political traction for Democrats, as Republicans insisted that it was too little, too late, and that draconian deterrence measures were necessary.
The reality is that migration to the United States from Central America is largely driven by push factors forcing people out of their home countries, not pull factors luring them to the United States, which explains the lack of evidence for the efficacy of deterrence. As a worker at a migrant shelter in Tucson, Arizona is reported as explaining, “Why would you undertake such a dangerous journey? When you’ve got a gun to your head, people threatening to rape your daughter, extort your business, force your son to work for the cartels. What would you do?” While Trump insists on depicting migrants from Central America as gang-members, or even soldiers “sent” by their home countries in a mythical war on American interests, it is probably best to think of human beings fleeing their nations because of violence as asylum-seekers.
The Refugee Act of 1980 defines refugees and asylum-seekers to be those who are persecuted, or have “a well-founded fear of persecution[,] on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” The law also provides a right to any alien within the United States to seek asylum, requiring those seeking such status to cross the border. Trump appears to see asylum, one of the basic pillars of human rights law, as a loophole to be exploited by evildoers, and is seeking to close that “loophole,” if not through legislation, then through deterring those seeking safe-harbor. Trump’s Justice Department, has moved to exclude domestic violence and gang targeting as bases for establishing persecution based on membership in a particular social group, overturning Board of Immigration Appeals precedent. On a moral level, there seems little reason to distinguish between the persecution faced by political dissidents in totalitarian regimes, and that faced by victims of the reign of terror perpetrated by gangs in Central America. Certainly, the pervasive fear of violence under both regimes is what drives people to seek safety in other countries. It is this push-factor, the pervasive violence faced by many Central Americans in their home nations, that is driving migration to the United States, and no amount of deterrence, short of recreating the violence of their home nations at the American border, will change the minds of those who feel forced to flee for their lives.
NBC News
That said, as Trump is able to feed on fear and hate in order to build political power with his Republican base, it is unlikely that evidence-based policy arguments about the efficacy of deterrence policy will make much headway towards a reconsideration of said policy. Perhaps a congressional re-imagination made possible by the new Democratic House majority will lead to legislative changes prompting a humane response to what is at base a humanitarian crisis. The House leadership’s recent refusal to appropriate money for what many consider a boondoggle border wall suggests that Democrats are eager to pass sensible border policy rather than acquiesce to Trump’s grandstanding. Congressional mandates that the executive branch again consider domestic violence and gang intimidation as possible bases in the determination of asylum would be a start. Shifting resources from detention centers to asylum officers and immigration judges, thereby treating asylum-seekers as asylees and not felons would help as well. And, in the long-run, Congress should consider how best to address the push factors causing people to flee for their lives in the first place.
Dan Ordorica anticipates earning his Juris Doctor from Boston University School of Law in May 2019.
