California’s leading advocates of
rational reform, Joe Mathews and Mark Paul (co-authors of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can
Fix It), double-teamed California’s new “Top Two” or “Jungle” primary
system, reminding us in the process that the election that occurred earlier
this month was not a primary in any meaningful sense of the word. Mathews and Paul have form, having written
the best book out there on California’s democratic deficit and how we can solve
it.
Paul
provides perhaps the most accurate description of “Top Two”, although it’s
probably a not a descriptor that will be appearing in family newspapers. He points out that a ‘primary’ which excludes
parties from participating in the general election is not a primary at all, but
rather round-one of the general election.
“Millions of California voters”, Paul writes, “will be surprised come November
to discover that they have only limited party choices—no minor party
candidates, and in many legislative and congressional districts, only
candidates from one of the major parties.
The big choices, they find, have been made in June, in the low-turnout
first round”. I wonder whether, in constitutional
terms, it is even permissible to prevent parties from appearing on the general
election ballot. Proposition 14, the
initiative responsible for this latest train-wreck on the part of California’s
already mangled democracy, certainly warrants a legal challenge.
A UC San Diego political scientist agrees
that “Top Two” is not a primary, because, as others have been pointing out, a
primary is about parties selecting their candidates for the general
election. He points to districts where members
of one party or another have “lost the right to even make their case to the
general election electorate”, and to those in which (when you tally up the percentages
of all the candidates from each party) potentially swing-districts are now,
through a quirk of the system, going to feature a run-off between members of
the same party, voiding the very “competition” that “Top Two” proponents were
supposedly promoting. (The comments on
the Fruits and Votes story, in a departure from the norm, actually feature an
intelligent conversation about how to rationalise the voting system.)
Fine, say defenders of irrational (and
deliberately undemocratic) reform, this should teach people to pay more
attention in June and it’s their own fault if they don’t turn up. When your argument about a question of
democracy involves “teaching people a lesson” instead of learning lessons, you’re
in trouble, and this approach to the very serious problems of political
alienation, voter non-participation, and civic disengagement is backwards,
stupid, and somewhat malicious.
Mathews draws
attention to other failings of “Top Two”, noting that it is highly unlikely
that issues will feature prominently in the general election in races that pit
members of the same party against one another.
Meaning that what we’ll get, instead of “moderation” or “centrism” (two
of the most vacuous and oft-used words in our political lexicon), is a “bloodbath”
in which the candidate who can most effectively go negative on his or her
opponent will win.
You know your reform measure is in
trouble when it falls afoul of the pen of LA
Times columnist and moderate extraordinaire George Skelton. Skelton would be a natural supporter of California’snewly-rigged system which is designed to send “moderates” or “centrists” to
Sacramento. Skelton
not only calls the reform “screwy” for forcing candidates who won overall majorities
in June to compete again in November, but quotes one of the measure’s supporters
saying (sans irony) that “Democracy works best when decisions are made by the
most people” (a strange thing to come from the mouth of someone who just openly
rigged an election with an aim to giving “independent” voters an inflated voice.
It’s always been my understanding that
most June voters are at the wings of their parties (I won’t call them ‘extremists’,
as is popular, both because ‘extremism’ is in the eye of the beholder and
because in no sense is a broad political spectrum represented in the candidates
who line up before us in the fall anyway).
I’m not sure why anyone would expect these voters to go for the most ‘moderate’
member of their party...it was a series of primaries dominated by enthused Tea
Parities which, after all, gave the fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party
its 2010 victories. Besides, the attempt
to create a non-ideological legislature goes very strongly against the will of
our highly-ideological electorate. Reformers
would be better off endorsing an electoral system in which election results
actually matter.
It’s hard to draw any other conclusion
than that California’s elections have not only been rigged, but rigged so
spectacularly thoughtlessly that they’re highly unlikely to bring about the
artificial state of affairs that the ‘riggers’ envisioned. And that’s leaving aside the fact that proponents
of Prop 14 grossly mis-diagnosed the state’s malady, meaning that even if Prop
14 produced columns of moderates marching in non-ideological lockstep with some
brilliant (but as yet unveiled) centrist philosophy, it wouldn’t address the
real problems: the state’s enormous democratic deficit; the disempowerment of
our elected representatives by supermajority rules; the mismatch between the
power that voters wield and the responsibility they take for that power; and
the resulting gridlock.
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