Summary
Voters across eight states, including Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada, rejected ballot measures for election reforms such as ranked choice voting (RCV) and open primaries, despite a $110 million push from advocates.
The movement, inspired by Alaska’s 2020 adoption of these reforms, failed to gain traction, with critics citing confusion and doubts over RCV’s benefits.
Some reforms succeeded locally, including in Portland, Oregon, but opposition remains strong.
$100M push?
Peanuts.
Musk invested $145M just to win PA for trump.
Until we have billionaires pumping billions into improving our way of life, things will only get worse.
And billionaires are never going to pump billions into improving our way of life, because they’re all narcissistic sociopathic dragons who care only about continuing to enrich themselves further at the cost of our way of life.
Which means we’re in late stage capitalism. In history, that usually is also the end for the democracy of those governments.
The RCV proposition in Arizona was terrible.
It allowed lawmakers to change the number of candidates who advance to the Ranked Choice Voting stage every six years, which means they could literally force it down to two candidates anyway.
Even better, if lawmakers can’t agree on the number of advancing candidates by a deadline, the Secretary of State just gets to choose it by themselves with no oversight.
Missouri got their anti-RCV proposal passed by billing it as an amendment declaring that non-citizens cannot vote. That’s right, they did it by banning something that was already against the law.
Maybe the way forward for election reform is to put it as a footnote in a proposition declaring murder to be bad.