Why Voters Rejected Election Reform
The Atlantic (archive.ph)
By Russell Berman
2024-12-08 15:34:44GMT
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
This was supposed to be the year that political reform took off. A nearly $100 million campaign gave voters in seven states the opportunity to scrap party primaries, enact ranked-choice balloting, or both. Advocates of overhauling elections had billed the proposals as a fix for two of the most hated problems in politics: gridlock and polarization. And they promised nothing short of a transformation across state capitols and Congress—more compromise, less partisanship, and better governance.
Voters said “No, thanks.” Election-reform measures failed nearly everywhere they were on the ballot in November—in blue states such as Colorado and Oregon, in the battlegrounds of Nevada and Arizona, and in the Republican strongholds of Montana, Idaho, and South Dakota. Alaska was the only state where reformers prevailed: By a margin of just 737 votes, the state rejected an effort to repeal a recently adopted system that combined nonpartisan primaries with ranked-choice voting.
The results were a resounding defeat for boosters who had hoped to expand Alaska’s first-in-the-nation voting method, dubbed Final Four Voting, to other states. And these outcomes proved that reformers still haven’t figured out how to sell the country on possible solutions to core problems that voters repeatedly tell pollsters they want addressed. “Mea culpa,” Katherine Gehl, the entrepreneur who has championed the system for years, told me. “We have totally failed at the marketing.”
Final Four advocates are now debating their path forward. Gehl wants to keep pushing in the hope that a renewed education campaign will win over voters. Others worry that the problem runs deeper—and think that scaling back the proposal could be the only viable route. However frustrated voters are with politics, they clearly aren’t ready to reshape how they elect their leaders.
Marketing Final Four isn’t easy. Explaining how the proposal works and why it would improve governance in a 30-second TV spot would challenge even the best ad makers. The system starts with a primary open to all parties and candidates. The top four finishers advance to the general election, where the winner is determined by ranked-choice voting—itself a relatively new innovation with which many voters are unfamiliar.
The ultimate goal is to reward, rather than punish, cross-party dealmaking. In many states and districts dominated by either Republicans or Democrats, representatives must cater to only the small, polarized slice of the electorate eligible to vote in closed party primaries. Because their general elections aren’t competitive, they have little reason to appeal to people beyond their base. The combination of open primaries with ranked-choice voting, Gehl and other advocates argue, allows for more competitive elections. In turn, those will encourage representatives to campaign and legislate with a broader pool of voters in mind, while ensuring that a larger portion of the electorate has a meaningful voice in the election.
Alaska voters approved the system in a 2020 referendum and, in its inaugural run two years later, elected a Democrat to the U.S. House for the first time in 50 years while handing a conservative Republican governor a second term. They also reelected the moderate Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. In the state Senate, the elections resulted in a bipartisan governing coalition that generated a flurry of compromises. For Final Four’s supporters, Alaska was a clear success.
Not everyone agreed. Opponents of the system, joined by the state Republican Party, organized a repeal drive that galvanized opposition to the proposal in other states and nearly ended the Alaskan experiment in its infancy. Critics branded Final Four as an exercise in oligarchy—an attempt by wealthy donors with ulterior motives to foist a confusing system on voters who didn’t want or need it.
In Colorado, opponents charged that one of the idea’s chief backers, the businessman Kent Thiry, sought to change the state’s rules to ease his own path to the governor’s office (a claim Thiry denied). Final Four’s defeat there this year “was a profound rejection by the grassroots of big money in politics,” Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat who opposed the reform, told me.
Gehl says she remains committed to the entire Final Four proposal, but others in the movement think the design might need adjustments. It proved to be “a lot for voters to swallow,” said Thiry, who co-chairs Unite America, a reform group that spent more than $50 million on ballot campaigns across the country. (Thiry pegged the reform movement’s total spending as “in the neighborhood of $100 million.”) “We need to look at both what we are proposing as well as how to market it.”
Although the proposals do not inherently advantage one party over the other, Republicans have turned against ranked-choice voting in particular, and the idea has fallen out of favor with some political reformers who say its use in Maine and cities including New York and San Francisco has done little to improve local elections or governance. Many of the ads that Final Four backers ran focused only on the open-primary part of the reform—an acknowledgment that ranked-choice voting would be a tougher sell. (For her part, Gehl avoids the words ranked-choice voting entirely, preferring the term instant-runoff elections instead.)
Eric Bronner, a co-founder of the group Veterans for All Voters, told me that internal polling in Nevada found much higher support for nonpartisan primaries than for ranked-choice voting; exit polling commissioned by Unite America in Colorado found a similar split. Ranked voting seems to be struggling because of both its complexity and the emerging partisan divide over the idea. That gap appeared to bear out in election results: In Montana, a proposal calling for a top-four primary fell short of passage by just two percentage points, while in Oregon, a ballot measure to use ranked-choice voting in major statewide elections lost by 15 points.
For reformers, the defeat in Nevada might have stung the most. Because state law requires that constitutional amendments pass in two consecutive elections, voters revisited a proposal that they had already approved in 2022—one that combined nonpartisan primaries with general elections run by ranked-choice voting. Despite its earlier success, the measure failed by six points, a result that its backers attributed in part to a better-funded opposition campaign. The “yes” campaign still spent far more money in the state, but with so much focus on the presidential campaign, Bronner said, it couldn’t break through. In the absence of a compelling message, voters stuck with the status quo. “Everyone agrees the current system is not working well,” he told me. “But then there’s a hundred different possible solutions, and getting people to agree on one and then care enough about it that they’re willing to go knock on doors or sign petitions … we just haven’t cracked the code on that yet.”
In Colorado, top Democrats were split on the Final Four proposal. Governor Jared Polis and Senator John Hickenlooper endorsed the idea, but the state Democratic Party and Bennet, Colorado’s senior senator, campaigned against it. Bennet told me the change would represent a “radical transformation” of the state’s election system, which he didn’t mean as a compliment. Colorado’s current election system is a “gold standard” that does not need fixing, he said, and proponents of Final Four made little effort to win support from the ground up. Bennet belittled arguments from Gehl and others that the system would decrease polarization and improve governance. “Their claim is not based on evidence,” he told me. “It’s based on game theory.”
If there’s a consensus among Final Four’s boosters, it’s that November’s results should not represent the last verdict. They reject the idea that Americans were issuing a vote of confidence in their political system, even as they acknowledge that advocates have yet to persuade voters to back a fix for it.
Although the reformers’ razor-thin margin of victory in Alaska wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, Gehl said the win allows Final Four more opportunities to produce results. “It’s going to take time for us to see the full flowering of what a Final Four voting system creates in terms of healthy competition, innovation, results, and accountability,” she told me. “It could easily take 10 years.”
In the meantime, proponents could move on to other ideas. Shortly after the election, a pair of centrist Democrats, Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State and Jared Golden of Maine, introduced legislation proposing a select House committee on electoral reform. In a letter accompanying the proposal, a group of academics declared that polarization in American politics is deeper now than at any point since the Civil War. Election reform, they wrote, can “produce a less hostile politics, a better functioning Congress, and a more representative democracy.” Among the proposals the panel would consider are expanding the size of the House of Representatives, creating multimember congressional districts with proportional representation, and establishing independent redistricting commissions. The legislation also mentions the two changes embedded in Final Four: nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting.
Getting Congress to agree even to study these ideas, let alone mandate them, will be a tall order in a Republican-controlled Congress. “It’s not something that we expect to go places tomorrow,” Dustin Wahl, the deputy executive director of the reform group Fix Our House, told me. “But this is the important step that we would need to take to move in the direction of transformational electoral reform.”
Nick Troiano, Unite America’s executive director, said his group was already looking at possible targets for more incremental advances. He mentioned Pennsylvania and Arizona as places where state legislators might agree to open their primaries to all voters even if the full Final Four system wasn’t viable. Kent Thiry also plans to push forward, comparing the drive for election reform to other movements—such as those advocating for women’s suffrage, racial equality, and same-sex marriage—that suffered setbacks before succeeding. But when I asked him whether he would help fund efforts to get Final Four on the ballot again in 2026, he was unsure. “We haven’t decided that yet,” Thiry said. “The wounds are too fresh.”
The Atlantic (archive.ph)
By Russell Berman
2024-12-08 15:34:44GMT
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
This was supposed to be the year that political reform took off. A nearly $100 million campaign gave voters in seven states the opportunity to scrap party primaries, enact ranked-choice balloting, or both. Advocates of overhauling elections had billed the proposals as a fix for two of the most hated problems in politics: gridlock and polarization. And they promised nothing short of a transformation across state capitols and Congress—more compromise, less partisanship, and better governance.
Voters said “No, thanks.” Election-reform measures failed nearly everywhere they were on the ballot in November—in blue states such as Colorado and Oregon, in the battlegrounds of Nevada and Arizona, and in the Republican strongholds of Montana, Idaho, and South Dakota. Alaska was the only state where reformers prevailed: By a margin of just 737 votes, the state rejected an effort to repeal a recently adopted system that combined nonpartisan primaries with ranked-choice voting.
The results were a resounding defeat for boosters who had hoped to expand Alaska’s first-in-the-nation voting method, dubbed Final Four Voting, to other states. And these outcomes proved that reformers still haven’t figured out how to sell the country on possible solutions to core problems that voters repeatedly tell pollsters they want addressed. “Mea culpa,” Katherine Gehl, the entrepreneur who has championed the system for years, told me. “We have totally failed at the marketing.”
Final Four advocates are now debating their path forward. Gehl wants to keep pushing in the hope that a renewed education campaign will win over voters. Others worry that the problem runs deeper—and think that scaling back the proposal could be the only viable route. However frustrated voters are with politics, they clearly aren’t ready to reshape how they elect their leaders.
Marketing Final Four isn’t easy. Explaining how the proposal works and why it would improve governance in a 30-second TV spot would challenge even the best ad makers. The system starts with a primary open to all parties and candidates. The top four finishers advance to the general election, where the winner is determined by ranked-choice voting—itself a relatively new innovation with which many voters are unfamiliar.
The ultimate goal is to reward, rather than punish, cross-party dealmaking. In many states and districts dominated by either Republicans or Democrats, representatives must cater to only the small, polarized slice of the electorate eligible to vote in closed party primaries. Because their general elections aren’t competitive, they have little reason to appeal to people beyond their base. The combination of open primaries with ranked-choice voting, Gehl and other advocates argue, allows for more competitive elections. In turn, those will encourage representatives to campaign and legislate with a broader pool of voters in mind, while ensuring that a larger portion of the electorate has a meaningful voice in the election.
Alaska voters approved the system in a 2020 referendum and, in its inaugural run two years later, elected a Democrat to the U.S. House for the first time in 50 years while handing a conservative Republican governor a second term. They also reelected the moderate Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. In the state Senate, the elections resulted in a bipartisan governing coalition that generated a flurry of compromises. For Final Four’s supporters, Alaska was a clear success.
Not everyone agreed. Opponents of the system, joined by the state Republican Party, organized a repeal drive that galvanized opposition to the proposal in other states and nearly ended the Alaskan experiment in its infancy. Critics branded Final Four as an exercise in oligarchy—an attempt by wealthy donors with ulterior motives to foist a confusing system on voters who didn’t want or need it.
In Colorado, opponents charged that one of the idea’s chief backers, the businessman Kent Thiry, sought to change the state’s rules to ease his own path to the governor’s office (a claim Thiry denied). Final Four’s defeat there this year “was a profound rejection by the grassroots of big money in politics,” Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat who opposed the reform, told me.
Gehl says she remains committed to the entire Final Four proposal, but others in the movement think the design might need adjustments. It proved to be “a lot for voters to swallow,” said Thiry, who co-chairs Unite America, a reform group that spent more than $50 million on ballot campaigns across the country. (Thiry pegged the reform movement’s total spending as “in the neighborhood of $100 million.”) “We need to look at both what we are proposing as well as how to market it.”
Although the proposals do not inherently advantage one party over the other, Republicans have turned against ranked-choice voting in particular, and the idea has fallen out of favor with some political reformers who say its use in Maine and cities including New York and San Francisco has done little to improve local elections or governance. Many of the ads that Final Four backers ran focused only on the open-primary part of the reform—an acknowledgment that ranked-choice voting would be a tougher sell. (For her part, Gehl avoids the words ranked-choice voting entirely, preferring the term instant-runoff elections instead.)
Eric Bronner, a co-founder of the group Veterans for All Voters, told me that internal polling in Nevada found much higher support for nonpartisan primaries than for ranked-choice voting; exit polling commissioned by Unite America in Colorado found a similar split. Ranked voting seems to be struggling because of both its complexity and the emerging partisan divide over the idea. That gap appeared to bear out in election results: In Montana, a proposal calling for a top-four primary fell short of passage by just two percentage points, while in Oregon, a ballot measure to use ranked-choice voting in major statewide elections lost by 15 points.
For reformers, the defeat in Nevada might have stung the most. Because state law requires that constitutional amendments pass in two consecutive elections, voters revisited a proposal that they had already approved in 2022—one that combined nonpartisan primaries with general elections run by ranked-choice voting. Despite its earlier success, the measure failed by six points, a result that its backers attributed in part to a better-funded opposition campaign. The “yes” campaign still spent far more money in the state, but with so much focus on the presidential campaign, Bronner said, it couldn’t break through. In the absence of a compelling message, voters stuck with the status quo. “Everyone agrees the current system is not working well,” he told me. “But then there’s a hundred different possible solutions, and getting people to agree on one and then care enough about it that they’re willing to go knock on doors or sign petitions … we just haven’t cracked the code on that yet.”
In Colorado, top Democrats were split on the Final Four proposal. Governor Jared Polis and Senator John Hickenlooper endorsed the idea, but the state Democratic Party and Bennet, Colorado’s senior senator, campaigned against it. Bennet told me the change would represent a “radical transformation” of the state’s election system, which he didn’t mean as a compliment. Colorado’s current election system is a “gold standard” that does not need fixing, he said, and proponents of Final Four made little effort to win support from the ground up. Bennet belittled arguments from Gehl and others that the system would decrease polarization and improve governance. “Their claim is not based on evidence,” he told me. “It’s based on game theory.”
If there’s a consensus among Final Four’s boosters, it’s that November’s results should not represent the last verdict. They reject the idea that Americans were issuing a vote of confidence in their political system, even as they acknowledge that advocates have yet to persuade voters to back a fix for it.
Although the reformers’ razor-thin margin of victory in Alaska wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, Gehl said the win allows Final Four more opportunities to produce results. “It’s going to take time for us to see the full flowering of what a Final Four voting system creates in terms of healthy competition, innovation, results, and accountability,” she told me. “It could easily take 10 years.”
In the meantime, proponents could move on to other ideas. Shortly after the election, a pair of centrist Democrats, Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State and Jared Golden of Maine, introduced legislation proposing a select House committee on electoral reform. In a letter accompanying the proposal, a group of academics declared that polarization in American politics is deeper now than at any point since the Civil War. Election reform, they wrote, can “produce a less hostile politics, a better functioning Congress, and a more representative democracy.” Among the proposals the panel would consider are expanding the size of the House of Representatives, creating multimember congressional districts with proportional representation, and establishing independent redistricting commissions. The legislation also mentions the two changes embedded in Final Four: nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting.
Getting Congress to agree even to study these ideas, let alone mandate them, will be a tall order in a Republican-controlled Congress. “It’s not something that we expect to go places tomorrow,” Dustin Wahl, the deputy executive director of the reform group Fix Our House, told me. “But this is the important step that we would need to take to move in the direction of transformational electoral reform.”
Nick Troiano, Unite America’s executive director, said his group was already looking at possible targets for more incremental advances. He mentioned Pennsylvania and Arizona as places where state legislators might agree to open their primaries to all voters even if the full Final Four system wasn’t viable. Kent Thiry also plans to push forward, comparing the drive for election reform to other movements—such as those advocating for women’s suffrage, racial equality, and same-sex marriage—that suffered setbacks before succeeding. But when I asked him whether he would help fund efforts to get Final Four on the ballot again in 2026, he was unsure. “We haven’t decided that yet,” Thiry said. “The wounds are too fresh.”
