Walter Olson
Here’s another roundup of short-form items on election law and policy:
For all the occasional creakiness of our decentralized way of holding elections under the Constitution, the reports from Venezuela make me again glad that we never developed a centralized, result-announcing national electoral commission. Past studies have been inconclusive on whether ranked-choice voting (RCV) in itself raises turnout. A new study says it does: “We find significant and substantially higher probabilities of turnout in places that use RCV,” possibly because it incentivizes campaigns to reach out to a wider range of voters. Note also that the combination of RCV with a single universal qualifying primary open to all voters and candidates—the “Final Four” or “Final Five” model—was associated with robust turnout when Alaska adopted it, according to work by the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Sightline Institute. Speaking of turnout, there is more evidence for a trend I’ve touched on before: while high turnout has historically tended to benefit Democrats, that correlation has faded and may even have reversed as poorer, less-educated, and low-civic-attachment voters increasingly favor Republicans. That has major implications for the politics of election reform: Expect partisans to begin moderating or even swapping sides on various process questions that are seen as encouraging or discouraging high turnout (Thomas Edsall, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Nate Cohn, Ilya Somin; straws in the wind on enthusiasm for nonpartisan voter registration drives). “We are at the beginning of a global movement. We are going to outlaw political lying,” said a politician in Wales, where the Labour Party–led regional government is preparing a bill “for the disqualification of members and candidates found guilty of deliberate deception through an independent judicial process.” Let me predict here and now that such a law either will be ineffective at turning politicians honest or will become a subject of selective if not malicious enforcement, or both. (Read more on the policing of electoral lies in my blog post “General Bans on Election Untruths Would Violate the First Amendment.”) In California’s Central Valley, a no-contest plea by a Lodi city councilman charged with election felonies sounds a very real alarm about the problems with ballot harvesting. Note, however, one dimension absent: per the San Joaquin County registrar, “California’s voting system didn’t immediately flag the ballots tied to Khan because the people being registered were real citizens with legitimate information.”
