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Opinion | If we open up our nominations process, let’s do it right
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Many of us are frustrated with Michigan’s nominating conventions. In a state with roughly 5 million voters, fewer than 10,000 party leaders, activists and donors take part in the nominating conventions. Voters deserve more voice.
We want candidates for secretary of state and attorney general to be nominated by voters in a primary and not picked by party insiders at a convention. However, moving these two contests to a primary ballot is only part of the solution.
Currently, we use single-choice voting in primaries (also called “plurality” voting or “first-past-the-post”). With single-choice voting each of us picks one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins. That’s fine where there are only two choices. However, when there are three or more contenders, single-choice voting can result in “vote-splitting” between like-minded candidates and voters, with one or more candidates labeled as “spoilers,” and nominees emerging without consensus.
This flawed way of picking nominees can pressure good people not to run for office, result in fewer choices for voters and lead to decreased interest and participation in primaries. Leaders and voters in both parties have experienced these problems and more with single-choice primaries.
Fortunately, there is a simple and cost-effective solution to improve primaries that maximizes voter participation, avoids vote-splitting, gives voters more meaningful choices and generates consensus with security, accuracy and transparency: ranked-choice voting.
With ranked-choice voting, voters have the power to rank candidates from favorite to least favorite — first choice, second choice and so on. If no candidate is the first choice of the majority of voters, the last-place candidate is eliminated and voters who liked that candidate best have their votes instantly counted for their second choices. Voters whose first choice advances to the automatic runoff continue to have their votes counted for their first choices.
Consider Michigan’s current three-way Democratic primary for US Senate. In this single-choice voting election, each of the candidates are incentivized to energize their base voters, knock down their opponents and deflate enthusiasm and turnout for their rivals. The winner of this single-choice primary could emerge with as little as 34% of the vote and the majority of voters who preferred another candidate may question whether the party’s nominee is truly representative. The nominee may need to spend precious time, energy and resources uniting the party base post-primary instead of talking to swing voters when only weeks remain before voters begin casting ballots in the general election.
Ranked-choice voting solves these problems by increasing the threshold needed to win from a plurality (the most votes) to a majority (more than half of the votes), introduces “automatic” or “instant runoffs” to ensure the nominee is broadly supported by voters and incentivizes candidates to reach beyond their base and appeal broadly for support.
In a ranked-choice voting party primary, candidates who can’t be your first choice want to be your second or third choice. While candidates still compare and contrast records, they hesitate to sling mud for fear that you might no longer rank them first or second, but rather last or not at all.
Seventeen million voters in 23 states already use ranked-choice voting. It has been proven to generate healthier competition and more representative outcomes in party primaries.
In Maine, where voters have ranked their choices in party primaries since 2018, candidates for governor have appeared together and asked supporters to rank rivals second or third instead of tearing each other down. In New York City’s last mayoral primary, the eventual winner cross-endorsed another serious contender and emerged with a clear majority in the final round of vote counting. We’ve seen similar results in Minneapolis, Washington, DC and in dozens of other cities across the country that have switched to ranked choice voting primaries.
As state lawmakers consider moving the nominating process for secretary of state and attorney general from the convention floor to the primary ballot, they should not stop with a partial fix. The Legislature should adopt ranked-choice voting for these contests and extend its use to existing primaries for at least the offices of president, US Senate, US House and governor.
Michigan voters deserve exciting primaries with meaningful choices, healthy competition, maximum voter participation and majority winners nominated through a consensus process that unites and not divides us.
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