Featuring Howie Hawkins, Rob Richie, Lynne Serpe and Mike Feinstein
Green Party 2024 presidential convention workshop – Aug 16, 2024
Howie Hawkins – Introduction
All right, so, as everybody knows in this time in the election cycle, ballot access is a huge issue for the Green Party. It’s damned hard in this country. And when we do get on the ballot, we’re marginalized by the spoiler effect of the winner-take-all system that generates our exclusive two-party system.
So today, we’re gonna talk about electoral reforms that Greens can campaign on to replace the exclusive two-party duopoly with an inclusive multi-party democracy. And the reforms we’re going to talk about include the Fair Election Act for fair ballot access, the Ranked Choice Voting in Presidential Elections Act, the Fair Representation Act for proportional ranked-choice voting in multi-seat districts for proportional representation in Congress, and then why we should oppose the top-four plurality primary initiatives on the ballot in several states in this election.
I am joined by a group of All-Stars when it comes to the electoral reform movement in the United States. I’m gonna introduce them in order of speaking. They’ll each go for about 10 minutes and then we’ll have questions and answers and comments. So hold them until the end.
I’m gonna give the first presentation. I’m Howie Hawkins. I’ve been active in the Green Party since our first national organizing meeting 40 years ago this August in St. Paul, Minnesota. And I’ve been pretty busy since then, including running as our Presidential candidate in 2020. I will talk about the Fair Election Act for fair ballot access.
Rob Richie has been the nation’s leading advocate and organizer for ranked-choice voting, proportional representation, and other pro democracy reforms since he co-founded FairVote in 1992. He’s gonna speak on ranked choice voting for the presidential election. And he thinks we can do it by 2028.
And then Lynne Serpe who most of you have heard from. She’s coordinating this convention. She’s a political educator, organizer, and campaign consultant who’s been a Green Party member since 1994 and has worked on many winning electoral campaigns and electoral reform campaigns throughout the US., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. She’s gonna talk about proportional representation in Congress.
And then Mike Feinstein. He’s a former mayor and city council member in Santa Monica, California. He ran for the Secretary of State of California in 2018 on a platform of ranked choice voting and proportional representation. And he’s gonna present the case against top-two, -four , or -five multi-partisan plurality-winner primaries.
I’ll start with ballot fair access.
Howie Hawkins – The Fair Election Act for federal standards of reasonable ballot access and retention
And you know, right now we’re all struggling to get Jill Stein on the ballot in many states. Fair ballot access has always been one of the central demands of the Green Party.
I remember Ralph Nader in his stump speeches in 2000. He would cite a 1948 proposal by the ACLU that we need federal standards for fair ballot access in federal elections. And then he would highlight the bill I’m talking about, the Fair Election Act, which Representative John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, introduced in 1989. And what I’m gonna say is, we should bring that bill back and make it an issue in all of our Congressional districts.
In this Fair Election Act, the maximum signature requirement for any federal election was 1,000 signatures, or signatures of 1/10th of one percent of the votes for that office in the previous election, whichever is greater. So that’s a lot lower than the standards most of us face running for Congress, let alone statewide.
And then the vote required in this bill for a statewide party candidate to get a party qualified on the ballot was 20,000 votes statewide, or 1% of the votes cast for in the preceding election for President or Senator, whichever is less, either the 20,000 or the 1%. Do the math. Compare that to your own states and you’ll find out that these standards are far lower than in most states. And if they were the standard, the Green Party would be on the ballot in every state.
Let’s think about this by applying the Conyers bill standard to running for the House in this country compared to other countries. Current petitioning requirements to run as an independent is really high in a lot of states. In my State of New York, it’s 3,500. In Illinois, it’s over 15,000. In Georgia, over 20,000. Alabama, over 30,000. Indiana, over 40,000.
Compare that to running as an independent in other countries for the Parliament. Their ballot-qualified parties get to nominate and put their candidates directly on the ballot. But if you want to run as an independent for the House of Commons in Great Britain, it takes 10 signatures. For the New Zealand Parliament, it takes 2 signatures. For India’s Lok Sabha, which is their lower parliamentary house, it’s 10 signatures. Australia, 100. Canada, 100, or 50 in their rural ridings, their rural districts. The German Bundestag, 200.
We have to get thousands or tens of thousands. And in most other countries, it’s a relative handful and no more than a couple of 100. I don’t wanna go over my time. I was gonna tell you about Putin’s Russia. It’s pretty bad there, but it’s even worse here. Even the Conyers Bill has higher standards than in most countries. But if you think about those standards, it’s a lot easier than what we have now.
So I’m arguing that this Fair Election Act is something that we should inject in House elections this year and, of course, in following years. We can do it now through extra-parliamentary actions, you know, meet with these Congressional candidates, organize a public meeting and invite them, demonstrate outside their candidate headquarters, meet with labor unions and community organizations about the bill. Raise it inside or outside of candidate debates, depending on a format. Banner drops. Leafletting. Skywriting. You can be creative. But we can inject this now. And, of course. when we have our own candidate, putting this into the election with our own candidate for the House, we have a lot more leverage, because then they can’t take our votes for granted.
I think this is something we can do, and it’s something we need to do because that Fair Election bill in 1989 went nowhere. It was referred to a couple of committees and was buried there without any hearings. It did have 37 co-sponsors. Most of them were members of the Congressional Black Caucus, which was more progressive in those days, along with some other progressives, even Nancy Pelosi when she was younger in her second term. But the Democrats are not gonna lead on fair ballot access. They haven’t done anything in the 35 years since this bill was introduced.
So it’s up to us, the Green Party, to bring back the Fair Election Act and force this issue of ballot access onto the national agenda by making it unavoidable in House elections across the country.
So I’m going to put the bill in the chat [https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/house-bill/1582/text] and turn it over now to Rob Ritchie to talk about how we can work for a ranked choice national popular vote for President.
Rob Richie – Fixing Presidential Elections with Ranked Choice Voting and the National Popular Vote plan
Thank you Howie. That was a model short presentation. I’ll also try to be focused in presenting on ranked choice voting and the National Popular Vote plan.”
I suspect most of you know what ranked choice voting is. It’s had such a sea change of growth in this country It’s become the fastest growing electoral reform these past 10 years.
Change is happening at all levels. It started with wins in cities, at times with the key help of local area Greens. Then it rose to states, starting with its passage in Maine in 2016. They now use it to elect the president there, as when Howie ran for President in 2020. Ranked choice voting is now in place in Alaska, with eight presidential candidates on the ballot this year.
Rather than a typical single choice ballot, you get to do more. You get to say who your second and 3rd choice is, and that simple change gives you more power to make your vote count. There really isn’t any other single change that makes more votes count across all elections while also creating the conditions for opening up elections more, like with proportional representation.
For Presidential elections, it is a state by state decision to use ranked choice voting. Congress can create incentives to encourage states to use it, but require it.
But Congress can pass RCV for Congressional elections. A bill being introduced by Jamie Raskin in the House, and Peter Welch in the Senate next month – the Ranked Choice Voting Act – would establish RCV for all U.S. Senate and U.S. House elections, which, of course, would make it straightforward for States to add it for President and other offices.
As we see RCV grow in local elections, it becomes easier to win statewide –and vice versa. Once RCV reaches a tipping point of being normalized, using it for our biggest elections becomes a more straightforward enterprise. We can have a debate about it over policy rather than getting caught up with logistics.
I wanted to introduce one key tactic. For deciding the Presidency, it all comes to a handful of swing states under the current Electoral College system. And so getting ranked choice voting in just a handful of those swing States essentially defangs the whole “spoiler debate” – and makes it possible to recognize that you can vote the way you want anywhere you are.
I think we are within reach of that change. Winning RCV for president is within reach in a number of swing states. We can also keep extending RCV to other states For example, this year, RCV’s on the ballot in a number of states and would directly affect the President in Oregon and Washington, DC. Ballot measures in Nevada, Colorado, and Idaho would affect other major statewide races and make it straightforward to add later for president. It’s also being defended in Alaska and a repeal would remove it for presidential elections in 2028.
Some of these ballot measures are for the “Top X model” – advancing something like four candidates from an all-candidate primary and then using ranked choice voting – that Mike is going to be critical of. I would just say briefly that that model does have allies. And so for those who want to see ranked choice voting expand, it’s a potential model. From a voter centric perspective and for affecting chances for pro-environment candidates to be heard, there’s a lot to say for it. I can understand why minor parties can feel threatened by a top four system, but it is a proposal that is really pushing ranked-choice voting to a new level.
Lynne’s going to talk about the Fair Representation Act for Congress. That’s our North Star at FairVote, It requires the proportional form of RCV for all US House races and adds RCV for all Senate races. The bill being introduced next month – the Ranked Choice Voting Act – takes out going to multi-winner districts. So it doesn’t go to PR, but it can also be implemented faster. It would require this change across all states by 2028. That’s a lift, but it’s actually getting the conversation heightened, and Raskin and Welch are strong messengers for that.
On a couple of specifics of the Ranked Choice Voting Act.
First, it would allow States to do a “Top X” model of primary. But they couldn’t make it a “top two.” So a state like California or Washington that only allows two candidates in November, would have to advance at least 3. And of course we would hope that they would do more if using RCV.
Second, it would establish ranked choice voting in all primaries. So every primary would always have RCV whether it’s a nonpartisan primary or a separate primary.
Finally, on presidential elections, Howie and I have talked about over the years about the National Popular Vote interstate compact – something I’ve worked a lot on since 2024. Greens have supported this, and it is a big change to try to win.
It’s based on the fact that states control what they do with electors, not Congress. States have established the current Electoral College rules in their state, for example – that is, the fact of the Electoral College is in the Constitution, but how States allocate electors is not. And so, we’re up to 17 states that have passed the National Popular Vote plan. Those States are agreeing to act collectively, in concert, to give all their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote in all 50 states once the total number of electoral votes in the states passing the compact represent a decisive majority of the Electoral College.
That will mean the candidate who wins the most popular votes in all 50 States and DC will always win. Once states in the compact represent a majority of the Electoral College, that popular vote winner is guaranteed to win all the electoral votes from the states in the compact..
It does work just fine with ranked choice voting. If the compact goes into place, states will define their popular vote totals after the ranked choice voting tally. So the ranked choice voting process in states like Alaska and Maine would always be respected. There are next steps ways to do it, including having an additional compact among the states that have ranked choice voting and a congressional bill that would be designed to support implementation of the National Popular Vote plan, including establishing that states will offer an RCV ballot to all voters.
In sum, here’s where we are. Changes are moving to win a popular vote for president. Ranked choice voting is in more states and ideally moving to all States. We’re much further than where we were not that long ago. As I see the movement out there, and see so many state groups working on ranked choice voting and reform, it’s exciting what can be done.
For getting involved, you can start locally. More and more cities are doing ranked choice voting.. We’re up to more than 100 colleges and universities where students have just organically decided to RCV – and that fits with the fact that young people, when RCV is on the ballot. typically vote for it with levels of sup[port like 75% or 80%. That youth support makes me believe that’s where we’re heading. It’s a matter of us getting from here to there.
It’s never easy, but we’re making progress – and the Green Party plays a big role in that. Your candidates for President have always been incredible messengers for ranked choice voting and local activists have had key roles in wins. So I look forward to engaging in the conversation here.
I’ll pass it off to you, Lynne, to talk about the Fair Representation Act. Thank you!
Lynne Serpe – The Fair Representation Act for proportional ranked choice voting for Congress
Thank you. I am going to talk about the Fair Representation Act.
But I’m gonna talk a little bit more about proportional representation, first. I’m gonna do that by telling a little bit of a story about how I came to learn about proportional representation, to get excited about it, and why I’m still a big fan of PR to this day.
Back in August of 1994, almost exactly 30 years ago, I got involved with a Green Party campaign in New Mexico with a candidate named Roberto Mondragon who was running for Governor. He had been with the Democratic Party as a Lieutenant Governor. I think one of the highest ranking candidates in the State up until that point. And it was a very exciting campaign. It was multi racial, multi-ethnic, drawing volunteers across all sorts of backgrounds, ages, etc. Incredibly exciting. But then, as we got closer and closer to Election Day, people did start worrying about votes being split, votes going to the Greens, and, you know, quote unquote, “spoiling” the election.
It turned out that that didn’t happen. We got about 10.4%, which is an amazing result in a first statewide race. But we did not, in fact, spoil or split the vote.
Fast forward to 1995. I helped organize the Green Party annual national meeting in Albuquerque, and it’s at that point where I learned about ranked-choice voting and proportional representation from one of the co-founders, along with Rob Richie, of the Center for Voting and Democracy which was the precursor to FairVote. Steve Hill was there, and gave a presentation similar to what we’re doing today.
It was there I learned that there was a solution called ranked choice voting to the problem we had just experienced in a single member seat and I thought that was great. But what got me excited was this idea of proportional representation, which, roughly, is just that seats are won in proportion to level of support.
The proportional ranked choice voting that Rob referred to, and here in the United States is often now called PRCV. In other parts of the world, it is referred to as the single transferable vote and the acronym for that is STV. Which can be an unfortunate acronym, although in many campaigns I’ve worked on we’ve used it like, “STV: it’s spreading” or “STV: not a disease but the cure.” So even an unfortunate acronym can be spun in the right way.
So with STV — what I wanted to mention is that it is both proportional and preferential. So to me, it’s a great system. And it can also be used in both partisan and nonpartisan elections. Because what you’re doing is you’re ranking your order preference.
So the freedom and flexibility that STV or PRCV allows, for people to be able to rank candidates in their order of preference, can be based on what other kind of constituency they might feel most directly impacted by whether it’s their race, their gender identity. Or maybe a specific issue activist, like an animal rights activist. I mean, at this point, the idea is to be representative. Proportional and representative.
Most of the people on this call are third party activists, specifically with the Green Party. And certainly we are looking at creating and building a Party that people want to vote for. And then we’re looking at trying to promote reforms so that those votes count and that they matter, and that’s fantastic. But there are elections around this country that are nonpartisan, and there are a growing number of people who do not affiliate with a political party.
And so I just really wanted to underscore that, because I think it’s important, there are many different types of proportional systems. But this particular one PRCV is just like in single member ranked choice voting where the voter just ranks the candidates in their order of preference.
We used to always say, IRV or STV or RCV: easy as 1, 2, 3, because that really is what voters do.
I want to also talk a little bit about my experience in other countries. Because I worked as the National STV Coordinator for the New Zealand Greens in Parliament. I have worked on a number of campaigns in Australia, which use STV. STV stands for the Single transferable vote, and I’ll post comments in the chat when I’m done making my presentation.
So Australia uses STV. New Zealand actually uses the Mixed Member form of Proportional Representation at the national level – MMP. But while I was there I was their National STV coordinator, and the goal was to try to get STV to be used in local elections, for District Health Board and local territorial authorities — what we think of as city councils.
After that I went to British Columbia, and they had a provincial referendum on STV. And at this point in time it was exciting. This was 2005. There seemed to be a lot of momentum. Things were growing and things were building in British Columbia. We actually got 58% of the vote for STV. But unfortunately the Government had put in a 60% threshold, so we lost. I was listening to us talk about these difficult ballot access requirements, and those are heartbreaking. Just how hard we have to work just to give voters a choice. But I can tell you, losing an election with 58% of the vote. I mean, I’m still barely recovered, and it’s been almost 20 years.
Anyway, I wanted to mention all this because a lot of times people are talking about good ideas that they’ve read about. Good ideas that they’ve read about from an academic perspective. Or perhaps they’ve heard someone speak at a conference. Good ideas with proven tracks, and that’s absolutely true for ranked choice voting, and proportional representation.
But I went from being someone who got excited by this idea, to someone who campaigned using STV, and campaigned for STV, and worked for Green Party New Zealand Members of Parliament under MMP
I sat down with election officials in New Zealand to design the education materials about STV.. I have campaigned and helped people win and get elected under STV in Australia. So I am talking about this not just from a long time 30 year Green Party activist perspective, but also someone who has seen this put in place. And what I have seen is that when you have diverse viewpoints around the legislative table, it makes better public policy.
It is really that simple: representation matters. The lived experience of different people matters. It matters. When they are making legislation, when they are representing people. And so for us to continue, as a country, to have single member, winner-take-all seats is a complete failure of democracy.
So FairVote has put forward what they refer to as their gold standard: The Fair Representation Act. And it’s pretty straightforward. It’s ranked-choice voting in multi member seats for Congress, ranked-choice voting for Senate. Those are single member seats. The Congressional seats would likely be between 3-5 multi member districts. By doing so, they’re effectively clustering single member seats into multi member seats. And so that also helps address the issue of gerrymandering.
One of the things when I come back to the United States from campaigning all over the world, is I start seeing these different maps, these different districts, that are carved out and created to try to predetermine a result — usually by partisan actors. The Fair Representation Act is really trying to take that out of the hands of those partisan actors. They’re trying to give the power back to the voters again.
One of the things that struck me at the first Global Green Conference in Australia was how many Greens were elected as national Members of Parliament in their respective European countries, and what struck me is that so many of them received lower voting totals, lower support than many Greens here in the United States. The sole difference was their voting system.
Rank candidates in their order of preference, and they’re doing so in multi member seats so that seats can be won in proportion to level of support. So, for example, in a three-member seat, you would need to win 25% plus one. And there are Greens all over this country who have gotten those kinds of numbers.
So I come from this with the idea that we need to break the two-party system. That is my analysis. We need to absolutely break open the two-party system. And proportional ranked-choice voting is one of the best ways to do that. So I’m going to close with a bit of a challenge here. I absolutely want you to support the Fair Representation Act. Fairvote has a number of amazing resources on their website. And again, I will post those in the chat.
But as someone who is looking at people who are campaigning at the congressional level, state level, maybe considering at the local level. What you want to do is look and see: are there options that currently exist in your area where there are multi member seats? That could be a city council that has at-large districts.
Because at the end of the day, from all my experience, from 30 years: a good idea is not enough.
So, in response to the chat: a multi member seat is multiple seats, multiple winners. In a single member district, you are electing one person. In a multi member seat, you’re electing whatever number is determined — and in the Fair Representation Act, they’re saying maybe three seats all at one time. Could be four, it could be five. That’s my understanding. And certainly later, if I have that wrong, correct me.
The challenge is to look at where there is a problem to solve. So in all my years of campaigning, the biggest thing that happens is that the “no” side — which is basically the status quo — what they have to do is hammer on a single point, because, better the devil you know. So we need to be solving a problem. It is not enough to be right. It is not enough that this might be a better, or even the best system, in my opinion. What we need to be doing when we’re presenting it to voters is to be defining that problem. And so that is a key thing that all of us have to do.
Even before I got active with the Green Party, I was active with the PIRGs, the public interest research group, and they taught us: you need to put the clipboard in their hands.
So my challenge to people today is: do your research, figure out what problem you are trying to solve, get the clipboard in their hands — and break open the two-party system. Thank you very much.
Mike Feinstein – Why jungle primaries – i.e. top two/top four/top five/top ‘x’ – are bad for democracy
Hi, everybody, Mike Feinstein, Santa Monica, California. It’s really an honor to be on this panel with these great great great electoral reform activists, and thank you for everybody who came.
I think, as as you know, the Green Party believes that democracy is enhanced by giving all voters a real opportunity to vote for and elect representative who reflect people’s views and we seek a viable multi-party democracy, with a full range of political parties on the general election ballot for voters to choose from — all with distinct platforms and policies that represent the diversity of political viewpoints within society.
And as Lynne is talking about, an electoral system that allows all parties to run candidates and win legislative seats in proportion to the percentage of the popular vote. That’s why Greens want to replace legislative elections from single-seat legislative districts with elections for multi-seat legislative districts by proportional representation as Lynne just argued.
Unfortunately, the biggest obstacle today to this change are top two and top four elections. Why? Because they misdirect rightful voter frustration with the current system into counterproductive reform, using false anti-party narratives. By them doing that, we risk losing the opportunity for needed reform that comes with a historic moment that is a result of the growing dissatisfaction of the under-representation that comes from single seat elections. How is that manifested?
The 60% plus who poll say they want a third party. The growing number of voters who don’t affiliate with either major party. And the large percentage of voters registered voters who don’t vote at all.
Unfortunately, these top two, top four, top ‘x’ systems are designed to maintain single seat winner-take-all elections — but by creating conditions that weaken political parties and increase the money of the role of big money in elections, while mostly wiping out minor parties even more than the current system does today.
These top ‘x’ do what? First, they eliminate party primaries and the ability of political parties to nominate their own candidates — and they eliminate the right of all ballot qualified parties to place their nominees on the general election ballot.
The ability to nominate our own candidates is something that is definitional for the Green Party, because as a movement-party, we seek to practice what we preach by having a grassroots, bottom-up movement choose our platform and our candidates. Instead, under top four systems, all candidates from all parties are forced into a single jungle primary, often with multiple candidates from many parties, three Dems, three Republicans, two Libertarians, two Greens, etc. The practical result that we’ve seen so far is that these top ‘x’ systems funnel voters into voting for candidates from the major parties, yet they blur the lines of what those parties even stand for.
This makes it even less likely that voters will have clear choices from among candidates and parties that represent a range of distinct policies and platforms. And this increases the cost of elections, because now primary election candidates have to spend money to reach all voters in the primary, not just members of their party. Not only does this favor big money, but this is a direct blow against minor parties that often build grassroots campaigns slowly in the spring and get stronger by the time of the general election.
So top ’x’ systems not only eliminate the automatic place that minor parties have on the general election ballot. But they expand the disincentive to vote for minor party candidates that we have today in most states in the General election, — where we have this so-called ‘vote-splitting/spoiler’ dynamic for a single seat — into the primary election season and spread it over multiple seats.
Some people say, “top four is better than top two because there are more seats, and therefore maybe a minor party candidate can squeak through to the General election. But the disincentive to vote Green in the primary remains if it’s a top four system. In many cases two Democrats are going to make it to the top four. If you are a progressive voter, you’re going to give your primary election vote in many cases to the most progressive Democrat, not the Green, in the hope that at least you’ll get that progressive Dem into the top four, even if they finish behind a more centrist Dec. So there is a great disincentive to actually vote for minor party candidates in these systems.
In some race cases there may not be as many candidates from the major parties as seats, so maybe a minor party candidate can make it to the General election. But it is patronizing to parties like the Greens and their voters to say, “[under a top ‘x’ system] you have a small chance to be on the general election ballot, when [under the current system] you are already guaranteed a spot on the general election ballot. After we Greens have gone through the very hard test of getting on the ballot for our party, we’re supposed to adopt a plantation mentality under top four. “Yes, sir, thank you. Please whip me some more. Thank you so much for giving me a small possibility to be on the General election ballot.”
And in the most important races, the likelihood is that there will be many strong candidates, so a practically nil chance of a Green being on the General election ballot. Imagine that a top four system was in place for President, where it is fortunately not allowed by Federal law.
Imagine now this year [on the Republican side] you’d have Trump, DeSantis, Haley, Cruise, Rubio, and likely others. For the Dems you’d have Harris, Buttigieg, Newsom, Whitmer and likely others. No way that a Green appears on the General election ballot under a top four with multiple well-known major party candidates running. No way that a Green Presidential candidate can be on the ballot like Jill Stein, raising issues that the major parties won’t touch, or are weak on.
So now apply that to statewide elections. What often happens with us Greens and other minor parties, is because we don’t have a lot of resources, we focus our limited resources to get on the ballot for a few statewide races, so we have a chance to talk to all General election voters.
But in a top ‘x’ system, where you have multiple major Party candidates running, we’re gonna get wiped out — not appear on statewide General election ballots, not be able to raise our issues, and voters won’t even hear about us when they are paying the most attention to elections.
Let me give you a good example of why this is bad for public debate. In 2022 in California we had a marvelous Green governor candidate named Luis Rodriguez. Luis was eliminated after the top two jungle primary. Then right after that, our Governor Democrat Gavin Newsom, extorted the State Legislature to make an over 1 billion dollar loan to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant open until 2030, when it was supposed to be closed in 2025 and resources instead were supposed to go to efficiency and renewables. Now keeping it open until 2030 is going to expand the cost to close to $12 billion. But there was no way for General election voters who could have voted Green at that time to express their displeasure with that dynamic because Newsom waited to do it until after the jungle primary election.
So top ‘x’ primaries are also problematic just when there’s large number of candidates, even from the major parties, because you get so many vote-splits in a primary election, so that it’s very random who makes it to the top four — or there’s pressure for candidates to drop out, to minimize the vote-splitting.
And the the darkest part of all of this is that the anti-party narrative, to eliminate party primaries, we have these top ‘x’ systems, assumes that the large number of non-affiliated parties reject the idea of political parties per se.
But it’s the fact that voters aren’t represented under the current system that causes them to reject what we have today. It’s not that they’re rejecting the ideas of parties per se, it’s that there often isn’t a party that represents them that has a chance to get elected in the General election. That’s the democratic deficit that must be addressed by real reform, not trying to re-rig somehow these single-seat, winner-take-all systems.
So then we get to the question of RCV. The problem with top four systems is they are hijacking a great idea of ranked-choice voting and using it to push these undemocratic top four election systems.
The comparison is between Maine, which uses ranked-choice voting in the general election, after all of the political parties have nominated their own candidates, and this is also being proposed in Oregon this year [with Measure 117.] The system in Maine preserves the idea that it’s healthy for a democracy to place a wide range of world views before general election voters, views that are reflective of a broad range of society, and this again retains political parties’ ability to put candidates on the General election ballot, and then they use ranked-choice voting in the General Election.
It’s a logical step from Maine’s use of range voting, which again guarantees a General election spot for the nominees of all ballot-qualified parties, to multi-seat elections by proportional representation, which embodies the idea that supporters of those parties all deserve legislative representation.
The problem with these top x systems is that they are a form of is that they are form of party suppression. Party suppression is voter suppression and voter suppression is a voting rights issue.
Top four primaries are a concealed form of voter suppression that hijacks ranked-choice voting. If these top ‘x’ systems get institutionalized, we lose the idea that supporters of minor parties even get any voice at all. This anti-party mentality that maintains that jungle primaries are preferable to party primaries is very dangerous for our democracy, because it misreads or intentionally misrepresents the frustration that voters have under our current system.
This is the difficulty that we’re facing right now. Misleadingly, proponents of these primaries have called them open primaries. They’re not. Open primaries are systems that retain party primaries, but allow any voter to choose to vote in a party primary of their choice. But instead of promoting an inclusive multi-party system, these Top ‘x’ systems take us further away from it.
We’re in a position now where there’s a lot of big money behind these top ‘x’ systems. To be generous to some of the people backing them, they don’t like how the the current system works, and they think that they can play with it a little bit by using ranked choice voting, and maybe get a slightly better result in the General election.
To be less generous, top ‘x’ this is a system now that makes it a more candidate, and money-driven system, which means people who have big money have an incentive for these top ‘x’ systems to go in instead of proportional representation because they can have more ability to interest in buying the results from these sort of systems.
In the end, when you look at the countries that the United States is most compared to — of the 38 OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) countries around the world, 33 of them use some form of proportion. It’s only the ex-colonial systems from from the UK and one or two others that don’t have some form of proportion representation.
The danger with these top four systems is that it is going to lose the historic moment we have, when massive numbers of people in this country feel unrepresented or underrepresented by the current system — and manipulate that rightful concern into a false premise of elections that maintain the status quo of single-seat representation. Even if top ‘x’ systems were an improved version of single-seat winner-take-all legislative elections, the reality is that with single-seat, winner-take-all district elections, large numbers of voters don’t get representation, they’re left on the side, and therefore everybody in society does not get a seat at the table of our democracy.
As Greens, we look from the ecology that everything is interconnected, and we believe that our governments need to reflect that interconnection by giving everybody a seat at the table of democracy.
That’s why, as Greens, our national platform calls for opposing these kinds of systems, and instead, taking this historical moment, making the argument for ballot access, making the argument for public financing of elections, making the argument for debate inclusions for about qualified candidates, and most of all ranked-choice voting for single seat winner elections where all political parties have a candidate on on the general election, ballot and proportional for a legislatures,
If we move to a system with proportional representation for our legislature, then what will happen is, even in those races like Governor and President, we will have more political parties that are viable, and who have people who have served in the legislature who are very experienced and very talented. So even then RCV single-seat, general elections for statewide executive office and the U.S. Senate will have a lot more choice if they are combined with proportional representation for legislative elections, because we will have a viable multi-party democracy with 5, 6 or 7 viable political parties.
Thank you for your time.
Howie Hawkins –The Fair Election Act for federal standards of reasonable ballot access and retention
Rob Richie – Fixing Presidential Elections with Ranked Choice Voting and the National Popular Vote plan
Lynne Serpe – The Fair Representation Act for proportional ranked choice voting for Congress
Mike Feinstein – Why jungle primaries – i.e. top two/top four/top five/top ‘x’ primaries – are bad for democracy
