What to learn - and what to leave behind - from the 2024 ballot measure losses in Cascadia. Sooner or later, bad things happen to everyone. That's inevitable. The problem is that people often learn the wrong lessons from their misfortunes. Across Cascadia and beyond, proponents of unified primaries and ranked choice voting just had bad things happen to them. They lost four out of five statewide ballot measures in Cascadia and matched that record elsewhere. What's important now is to avoid learning the wrong lesson. The wrong lesson would be that winning a better democracy is hopeless - an impossible get. It is not. It's just hard. You lose more often than you win. You have to keep trying, even when the odds are against you. In fact, you have to study your losses assiduously and learn from them: they reveal the obstacles between you and victory. As Thomas Edison said about the trial and error required to invent the light bulb, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work." You have to persevere because success, when it comes, brings immense payoffs. Open primaries and ranked choice voting are steps toward a public sector that can better do its jobs, from educating children to maintaining roads, from safeguarding borders to defending rights, from policing crime to cleaning the air. Specifically, unified primaries and ranked choice voting upgrade representation, dampen extremism and polarization, and favor leaders intent on governing, rather than grandstanding. They yield a public sector that is better able to solve problems. Losing and winning Proponents of reform swelled with optimism in 2024 as one after another state put change on its ballot: in Idaho, Montana, and Oregon within Cascadia, and in five states outside Cascadia. Conversely, they grew concerned about an attempt to repeal open primaries and ranked choice voting in Alaska. The win/loss record left many of them disheartened (see table). Alaska was the only state where pro-reform votes topped 50 percent. Voters there rejected an attempt to repeal its model election system, but the final ballot gap was only 0.2 percentage points, barely a win. The measure next closest to winning on the list of Cascadian questions was Montana's Constitutional Initiative 126, which captured almost 49 percent of votes. It would have enacted unified, all-candidate, top-four primaries for most federal and state elections. Trailing behind with 42 percent support was Oregon's Measure 117, which would have used ranked choice voting in both party primaries and general elections for federal and statewide executive offices. Then came another Montana Constitutional Initiative, number 127, which required majority winners in Montana elections, but left the state legislature to decide how to achieve that goal. The logical options would have been instant runoffs with ranked choice voting or delayed conventional runoffs. The measure gained support of less than 40 percent. Finally, Idaho Proposition 1, which would have replicated Alaska's system of open, top-four primaries and ranked choice general elections in the Gem State, lagged the field. A little more than 30 percent of voters cast their ballots in its favor. In sum, therefore, November 5 brought one win (by a hair), one near miss, and three lopsided losses for election reform in Cascadia. Meanwhile, elsewhere, Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada rejected reform with support in the mid-forties, and South Dakota did so in the low forties. Among the ten ballot measures in populous jurisdictions for electoral reforms involving open primaries or ranked choice voting (five within and five without Cascadia), only in Washington, DC, did voters newly embrace reform. They did so with enthusiasm, approving ranked choice voting by 73 percent. Losing expensively One source of encouragement in this gloomy picture is that Cascadian places familiar with ranked choice voting, including Benton County, Oregon, and the state of Alaska (which already ...
