A Common Principle to Unite Political Reforms

A recent article in The Fulcrum says it was a mistake for recent referendum campaigns to combine proposals for open primaries and ranked-choice voting because voters were confused about why they were being proposed together, and argued that future campaigns should simply drop RCV from the package. I think that's the wrong answer. Here's what I wrote them:

There may be no logical connection between open partisan primaries and ranked choice voting, but there very much is for nonpartisan primaries. That connection is the principle of majority rule.

Nonpartisan primaries are superior for a couple reasons. One is that they avoid the perception that members of one party are intruding on the internal decisions of another, since everyone of every persuasion is equally free to vote their preference from a single field of candidates. Another is that it removes the obligation on voters to choose one major party over another even temporarily, and the burden of having to formally affiliate with a political body in a way that may feel insincere and rather like lying about their beliefs.

But if nonpartisan primaries are adopted, there's no guarantee that one candidate will receive a majority of the votes; all other things being equal, this is even less likely than in a partisan primary. If the principle of majority rule is to be upheld -- if there's to be assurance that the ultimate winner reflects in some sense a majority preference -- a straight runoff may not suffice, since the "top two" may have received less than half the total primary votes.

An example is the French presidential elections of 2002. The votes in the first round were divided up among a great number of parties, but more so on the left than on the right. As a result, even though the majority of voters had chosen left-of-center candidates, the top two were both on the right -- Jacques Chirac for the traditional right and Jean-Marie Le Pen for the far right. So in the runoff, many voters felt they had no choice but to "hold their noses" and vote for Chirac in order to defeat Le Pen.

But this scenario would be avoided with RCV. All that's required is the proviso that the candidates included in the second round are just those top vote-getters required to account for a majority of first-round votes. Especially with the aid of examples like the one above, it would be quite simple to explain this principle to people in a referendum campaign. Not only would they not be mystified about why the two issues were being combined, they would welcome this measure to prevent the election of candidates who don't represent the true preference of a majority of voters.