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Troiano convincingly explains the evils of our partisan winner-take-all primaries:

• Bad for voters, especially in closed primary states and in safe districts.  Party activists who consistently turn out in primary elections can often choose an extremist candidate who, nevertheless, is practically guaranteed to win the seat.  (More and more CO voters are choosing to be unaffiliated – almost 50% now – and have a choice of which primary ballot to vote.)
• Bad for the country because more extremist candidates lead to more polarization, less compromise and less effective government.  Fear of being primaried incentivizes elected officials to be on the extreme side of an issue.  Then when the party in power changes, we can have wild pendulum swings in government policy, e.g., abortion and military support for Ukraine.
• Bad for the political parties because PACs can spend money in low-turnout primary elections to elect an extremist to be the party’s nominee.  The founders of our nation learned that parties are a necessary organizing tool; today busy voters depend on party labels to make sense of the candidates and their stances, but voters typically have more nuanced and centrist views than the parties and don’t feel represented by their elected officials.

Troiano posits multiple times in his book, including on pages 151-2, “two key principles that any new system should uphold: 

• All eligible voters should have the freedom to vote for any candidate in every election, regardless of party. 
• A candidate must earn a majority [sic] of the vote in order to win an election.” 

Troiano’s basis for the first principle is that, if elections are taxpayer-funded, then no voter should be restricted from choosing among all the candidates for each office.

LWVCO would note that the second principle requires 2-candidate elections – which is not Troiano’s intent (though he does suggest on pages 162-3 that jurisdictions might want to limit ballot access to prevent too many candidates in a ballot contest).  An election with 3 or more candidates cannot guarantee a majority winner!  For this very reason, LWVCO advocated (successfully) to remove a majority criterion from a proposed 2020 LWVUS Voter Representation / Electoral Systems position prior to its adoption.  

Toward the end of The Primary Solution on page 257, Troiano admits that a candidate may not get a majority of votes cast in an Instant-Runoff (ranked) Voting election, but he persists in inaccurate use of “majority” or “true majority” throughout the book.  (A notable accurate usage of “majority” is on page 194 when Troiano notes that a majority of Electoral College votes is needed to outright win the presidency.)  Boulder used Instant-Runoff Voting in its recent mayoral election.

 

A Ranked Voting Ballot

Troiano points to historic successes in the nonpartisan (aka all-candidate or “jungle”) elections in California’s and Washington’s top-2 primaries, Alaska’s top-4 primary, and Louisiana’s traditional general election with a later top-2 runoff election if no candidate surpasses 50% of the vote.  

Troiano does remark that no one electoral reform is a panacea for all electoral problems and that no voting method is perfect (p. 258).  We can see that this year’s US Senate primary contest in California (held shortly after the book’s publication) illustrates a flaw in the top-2 nonpartisan primary.  The voters-choose-one-candidate primary resulted in three Democrats splitting 56.7% of the vote, allowing a Republican with 31.5% of the vote to advance to the general election against the top Democrat.  That Democrat is expected to easily beat the Republican in the general election, denying general-election-only voters a meaningful choice.  In contrast, Alaska’s top-4 nonpartisan primary provides for more choices in the general and therefore avoids much of the vote splitting seen in California’s top-2 primaries.

In “The Primary Solution” chapter, Troiano proposes 3 types of solutions:

1. Nonpartisan primary, e.g., the California model, Alaska model and a Final-Five model under consideration in Nevada.  Troiano fails to mention the St Louis Approval Voting top-2 primary in which voters can vote for all the candidates they support – no vote splitting!
2. No primary election, but the all-candidate general election may be followed by a runoff, e.g., the Louisiana model.
3. A single election limiting the number of candidates and/or allowing voters to rank 2 candidates (called Supplementary Vote).

Troiano prefers #3 and dubs it “Majority [sic] Winner Voting.”  For more proof that “majority” is a misnomer, see the 2010 North Carolina ranked-voting judicial election (very similar to Supplementary Vote) when McCullough won with fewer than 600,000 votes of the almost 2 million votes cast. 

 

An Approval Voting Ballot – Vote for all the candidates you want to support

Troiano argues that structural change to primary elections is important and dismisses the “just recruit and elect better candidates” strategy.  He sees the purpose of a primary election changing from nominating party candidates to winnowing down the field to a manageable number of viable candidates for the voters to research.

A long-term structural change that LWV would like to see is moving beyond single-winner elections whenever possible and implementing more multi-winner proportional voting methods.  Troiano barely mentions proportional representation.

The Primary Solution contains much more fascinating background and autobiographical information, as well as a dose of realpolitik, such as the need for lots of money to finance campaigns to make these structural changes a reality.  In fact, the book is partly a campaign guide for election reformers.  It’s worth a read. 

The primary (pun intended) complaint with the book is that Troiano doesn’t meet the high standards expected of an expert on this topic.  Even though we don’t expect the average person to use accurate voting-method language, an expert should.  When people realize that they were not told the full story, were oversold a bill of goods, or were misled, we could lose their support for better voting methods and some or all of their trust.

Troiano often states: Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  He sometimes deflects from rebutting criticism of Instant-Runoff Voting by (rightly) pointing out that IRV is better than Plurality Voting.  Still, a more comprehensive answer to criticism of IRV would be appreciated.

For example, on page 257 Troiano mentions that Instant-Runoff Voting’s center-squeeze problem “is theoretically possible” and asks “How often does it happen?”  He seems not to know or not to care that the 2022 Alaska special election, which he prominently profiles in the Alaska chapter, is a notorious case of a center squeeze.  In an IRV center squeeze, a centrist candidate is defeated before the final round of tabulation even though the centrist would have beaten any of the opponents in a one-on-one competition.  IRV’s center squeeze can incentivize polarization – much as partisan primaries do.

Throughout this book review, I’ve so far referred to Instant-Runoff Voting, but Troiano generally uses the umbrella term Ranked Choice Voting or RCV.  RCV includes a wide variety of different tabulation methods, including proportional voting methods (Fair Representation Act on p. 266 and Bottoms-Up 15% Threshold on p. 197-8) and the much-less-good Preferential Block (multi-winner) Voting used in Utah (p. 255).  Troiano also uses “RCV” to refer to the highly irregular voting method used in the 2021 Virginia Republican nomination process (p. 256).  Troiano uses the confusing RCV term and then inadequately refutes the statement that “RCV Is Confusing” (p. 254).

You may want to decide for yourself what you think of these ideas, either by reading the book or by hearing Troiano speak on Wed, May 22 at 6pm at the Tattered Cover on East Colfax.  If you are interested in better voting methods, consider joining the Voting Methods Team and/or the LWVCO Primary Election Reform study group.  Please email vmteam@lwvbc.org for more information.