Summary
Voters across eight states, including Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada, rejected ballot measures for election reforms such as ranked choice voting (RCV) and open primaries, despite a $110 million push from advocates.
The movement, inspired by Alaska’s 2020 adoption of these reforms, failed to gain traction, with critics citing confusion and doubts over RCV’s benefits.
Some reforms succeeded locally, including in Portland, Oregon, but opposition remains strong.
The RCV proposition in Arizona was terrible.
It allowed lawmakers to change the number of candidates who advance to the Ranked Choice Voting stage every six years, which means they could literally force it down to two candidates anyway.
Even better, if lawmakers can’t agree on the number of advancing candidates by a deadline, the Secretary of State just gets to choose it by themselves with no oversight.
$100M push?
Peanuts.
Musk invested $145M just to win PA for trump.
Until we have billionaires pumping billions into improving our way of life, things will only get worse.
And billionaires are never going to pump billions into improving our way of life, because they’re all narcissistic sociopathic dragons who care only about continuing to enrich themselves further at the cost of our way of life.
Which means we’re in late stage capitalism. In history, that usually is also the end for the democracy of those governments.
But we can only think of entertaining progressive policy once we have RCV in all 50 states!
In Montana it was separated into two confusing proposals. Ignoring the campaigning against it, as someone in support of RCV I had no idea that’s what they were talking about without looking it up.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.
Many people are too uninformed to understand why RCV benefits them. Others understand that it’s liable to upset the status quo that they like. Between ignorance and malice, it’s not surprising that RCV is a difficult sell.
In Arizona, the RCV proposition didn’t pass because it was bundled with open primaries. The bill was mainly about requiring open primaries with only a small mention of requiring ranked choice voting at the end. I would bet a lot of people here didn’t even know ranked choice voting was on their ballot.
I think it is more of a difficult sell because of all the political and financial opposition. Nobody outside the US considers systems with more than two parties complicated. Instead it is pretty straightforward. You vote a party and the party gets seats accordingly to how many people voted for it. It is easier than the whole swing-state electoral college bullshit. But looking at Baseball and Imperial units it seems Americans need things to be needlessly complicated.
Quite so. Same with the uniquely American obsession with acronyms. I swear to god, everything they touch gets one.
