In recent years, activist groups have promoted changes to America’s electoral systems that supposedly make government more democratic. But the actual record of these “reforms” shows that they tend to weaken genuine accountability and promote the election of more extreme candidates.
By far the most high-profile of these reforms is Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), currently in use in some 50 cities and counties, including Salt Lake City, Seattle, Portland, and, most notably, New York City.
Under RCV, instead of being asked to choose one candidate, voters are asked to rank several candidates in order of preference. Ostensibly, this makes the electoral system more democratic, since it enables voters not only to choose the candidate they most favor, but also to express their relative judgments of several other (typically up to five) candidates.
RCV has several nondemocratic aspects. First, a candidate who earned a plurality of first-place votes may end up losing the election if his rival wins enough second- or third-place votes. Candidates with fringe appeal in many cases have an advantage over candidates who attract strong mainstream support.
Additionally, as was the case in New York City this year, RCV encourages “deals” among rival candidates who agree to urge their voters to vote for another candidate as their second pick. In New York City, such a deal was made by now-leading Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a professed socialist, and City Comptroller Brad Lander, whose far-left political views don’t vary much from Mamdani’s, in the party’s primary.
The complexity of RCV further tends at the same time to advantage extremist candidates, whose partisans are more likely to devote the time and attention necessary to sort through a host of options and strategically vote to disadvantage more moderate candidates. This fact may help to explain the politically inexperienced Mamdani’s heavy victory in his party’s primary.
So-called “jungle” primaries have also become increasingly popular in varying forms in states like California, Washington, and (until recently) Louisiana.
Like RCV, jungle primaries are motivated in part by antipathy to traditional party systems. In a jungle primary, distinct party elections are replaced by a single, nonpartisan primary in which the top two finishers, regardless of their party affiliation, earn the right to compete in the general election – and third-party candidates are barred from running at all unless they can secure one of these spots.
Observing the operation of California’s RCV system, political analyst and Substack author Eric Cunningham notes that since it was rolled out in the Golden State in 2012, an increasing number of elections for both state offices and congressional seats are “lockouts,” meaning that the choice is limited to two members of the same party (mostly Democrats) – which reduces election turnout by discouraging members of the other party from voting at all.
The result is a reduction in the significance of parties in our political landscape, encouraging extremism rather than moderation among candidates who may rely on purely personal appeal rather than accommodate their party’s traditional coalition of interests – let alone appeal to members of the other party.
Cunningham cites a 2024 poll showing that if the winners in California’s primary for Senate that year had been the strongly partisan Democrats Rep. Adam Schiff and ex-Rep. Katie Porter, a majority of registered Republicans, who constitute 19 percent of the electorate, would simply have abstained from voting. (In fact, it turned out that Schiff’s rival in the election was Republican Steve Garvey, whose popularity Schiff had effectively boosted among Republican voters during the primary by portraying him as “too conservative” for the state. In this case, Schiff knew how to successfully game the system.)
One more gimmick that merits mention here is the system of public “matching” funds for political candidates, ostensibly designed to assist little-known candidates who lack support from corporations or other “special interests” to gain a shot at electoral victory. This system has reached an extreme in New York City, which disburses up to eight times the amount of the first $250 that a candidate raises from each donor.
As Benjamin Baird observes in a recent New York Post column, “it’s a system that’s prone to abuse – and in Mamdani’s case,” means that municipal funds “are undoubtedly amplifying voices of bigotry and extremism.”
Those bigoted and extremist voices, Baird observes, include the Islamic Circle of North America, “a Muslim nonprofit that terror experts identify as the North American branch of Jamaat-e-Islami, a violent South Asian Islamist group.” Five of that group’s members kicked in a total of $1,300 in individual contributions to Mamdani, resulting in his receiving a total of $7,700 when city funds are included.
Aside from donations from other radical Islamist groups with ties to Hamas, Baird notes, “a huge source of Mamdani’s matched campaign cash comes from academics and higher-education administrators employed by schools that have been embroiled in federal antisemitism probes,” with “New York academics at hard-left institutions contributing just over $105,000” to his campaign, equivalent to $690,000 when city matching funds are included. Altogether, Mamdani “has far outraised his opponents in private donations,” having received nearly $16 million.
The entire notion that taxpayer funds should be used to support the political candidacies of previously obscure individuals rests, as Mamdani’s case demonstrates, on a fallacious distinction between ostensibly “special” interests (political party organizations, businesses, real estate owners, police officers) and other interest groups. College professors, public school teachers, bureaucrats, activists, and journalists are no less distinct interest groups (however much they may portray themselves as purely disinterested servants of the public good) than corporate executives, blue-collar workers, or members of mainstream religious organizations.
While the First Amendment may restrict government action aimed at repressing the activities of advocates of violent terrorism, at home or abroad, it certainly does not oblige the government to help finance the political candidacies of individuals that such groups deem favorable to their causes.
Americans need to be re-taught the great benefits we derive from our two-party system, “first-past-the-post” elections that enable us to vote with finality for candidates of our choosing, and elections that leave candidates for office free to raise funds on their own – subject to disclosure of the source of their donations.
In the name of “progress” and promoting democracy, these so-called reforms risk dismantling the very mechanisms that make democratic government work.
David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.
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