In this guide, Bolts introduces you to ten elections that are coming up this month that will impact how local officials administer future elections, and how easily people can exercise their voting rights. 

Voters this month will select the secretaries of state of Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi, who’ll each be the chief elections officials within their state. They will choose a new supreme court justice in Pennsylvania, a swing state with looming election law battles, and dozens of county officials who’ll decide how easy it is to vote in Pennsylvania and Washington state next year. And some ballot measures may change election law in Maine and Michigan.

All these elections are scheduled for Nov. 7, except for Louisiana’s runoff on Nov. 18. 

As we cover the places where democracy is on the ballot, our staff is also keeping an eye on the other side of the coin—the people who are excluded from having a say in their democracy: Three of the eight states featured on this page have among the nation’s harshest laws barring people with criminal convictions from the polls, and our three-part series highlights their stories. And beyond the stakes for voting rights, our cheat sheet to the 2023 elections also lays out dozens of other local elections this November that will shape criminal justice, abortion access, education, and other issues. 

Kentucky | Secretary of state

Michael Adams, the Republican secretary of state of Kentucky, has vocally pushed back against the false conspiracies surrounding the 2020 election, and he has touted his efforts to facilitate mail and early voting during the pandemic. He survived the GOP primary this spring by beating back election deniers who wanted to replace him as the state’s chief election administrator.

Buddy Wheatley, Adams’ Democratic challenger and a former lawmaker, says the state should go much further in expanding ballot access. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that the candidates disagree on whether the state should institute same-day registration and set-up an independent redistricting commission, two proposals of Wheatley’s that Adams opposes. 

The election is unfolding in the shadow of the governor’s race, in which Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear is running for reelection four years after restoring the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of people who had been barred from voting for life. (Adams and Wheatley have both said they support the executive order.) Voting rights advocates regret that the order still leaves hundreds of thousands Kentuckians shut out from voting and that the state hasn’t done enough to notify newly-enfranchised residents; Bolts reports that a coalition led by formerly incarcerated activists has stepped into that void to register people.

Louisiana | Secretary of state 

In trying to appease election deniers since the 2020 presidential election, Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin weakened Louisiana’s voting system and gave a platform to election conspiracists. His successor will be decided in a Nov. 18 runoff between Republican Nancy Landry, who currently serves as his deputy, and Gwen Collins-Greenup, a Democratic attorney. Each received 19 percent of the vote in the all-party primary on Oct. 14, but Landry is favored in the Nov. 18 runoff since much of the remainder of the vote went to other Republican contenders.

Not unlike Ardoin, Landry has resisted election deniers’ most radical proposals but she has also echoed unfounded suspicions of voter fraud and election irregularities, Cameron Joseph reported in Bolts. The next secretary of state will have to deal with continued pressure from the far-right, Joseph writes, while making critical decisions regarding the state’s outdated voting equipment: The state’s efforts to replace the equipment have stalled in recent years amid unfounded election conspiracies about the role of machines in skewing election results.

Maine | Question 8

Since its drafting two centuries ago, Maine’s constitution has barred people who are under guardianship from voting in state and local elections. Then, in 2001, a federal court declared the provision to be invalid in response to a lawsuit filed by an organization that protects the rights of disabled residents.

Mainers may scrub this exclusionary language from its state constitution on Nov. 7, S.E. Smith explains in Bolts: Question 8 would “remove a provision prohibiting a person under guardianship for reasons of mental illness from voting.” While Mainers under guardianship can already vote irrespective of this constitutional amendment due to the 2001 court ruling, Smith reports that the referendum could spark momentum for other states with exclusionary rules to revise who can cast ballots and shake up what is now a complicated patchwork of eligibility rules nationwide. 

Michigan | Municipal referendums on ranked choice voting

Three Michigan cities will each decide whether to switch to ranked-choice voting—a system in which voters rank the different candidates on the ballot rather than only opting for one—for their local elections. If the initiatives pass, residents in East Lansing, Kalamazoo, and Royal Oak would join Ann Arbor, which approved a similar measure in 2021.

But there’s a catch: Even if voters approve ranked choice voting, it will not be implemented until the state of Michigan first adopts a bill authorizing the method statewide. The legislation to do so has stalled in the legislature so far.

Many cities have newly adopted ranked-choice voting in recent years, and some will use the method for the first time this November; they include Boulder, Colorado, and several Utah cities such as Salt Lake. Other municipalities this fall will also consider changing local rules: Rockville, Maryland, in the suburbs of D.C., holds two advisory referendums on whether their city should lower the voting age to 16 and enable noncitizens to vote in local elections.

Mississippi | Secretary of state

Republican Michael Watson spent his first term as secretary of state defending restrictions on ballot access. He stated he worries about more college students voting, rejected expanding mail voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, and championed a law that banned assisting people in casting an absentee ballot (the law was blocked by a court this summer). He is currently fighting  a lawsuit against the state’s practice of permanently disenfranchising people with some felony convictions.

Watson is now seeking a second term against Democrat Ty Pinkins, an attorney who only jumped into the race in September after the prior Democratic nominee withdrew for health reasons. Pinkins has taken Watson to task for backing these restrictions, and he says he is running to expand opportunities to vote, such as setting up online and same-day voter registration. Pinkins this fall also teamed up with Greta Kemp Martin—the Democrat challenging Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who is currently representing Watson in the lawsuit against felony disenfranchisement—to say that the state should expand rights restoration for people with felony convictions.

Pennsylvania | Supreme court justice

Pennsylvanians will fill a vacant seat on their state’s high court, where Democrats currently enjoy a majority. The outcome cannot change partisan control but it will still shape election law in this swing state, Bolts’ Alex Burness reports. For one, a GOP win would make it easier for the party to flip the court in 2025, affecting redistricting. It may also make it easier for the GOP to win election lawsuits next year: Voting cases haven’t always been party-line for this court, especially ones that revolve around how permissive the state should be toward mail ballots. Recent rulings made it more likely that mail ballots with clerical mistakes get tossed, an issue that now looms over the 2024 election.

Burness reports that Republican nominee Carolyn Carluccio has echoed Trump’s attacks against mail voting, implying an unfounded connection to election fraud, and she appeared to invite a new legal challenge to a state law that expanded ballot access in 2019. Dan McCaffery, her Democratic opponent, has defended state efforts to make voting more convenient, telling Bolts, “If we’re going to err, we should always err on the side of including votes.”

Pennsylvania | Bucks County commission

Pennsylvanians are electing the local officials who’ll run the 2024 elections, and the results will shape how easy it is for millions of people to vote next year in the nation’s biggest swing state. Daniel Nichanian reports in Bolts that counties have a great deal of discretion when it comes to the modalities of voting by mail, and local voting rights attorneys warn that if more counties adopt tighter rules, tens of thousands of additional ballots may be rejected.

Bucks County stands as the clearest jurisdiction to watch, Nichanian writes. Democrats gained control of the commission in 2019, part of a firewall against Trump’s efforts to game the following year’s election. The county commissioners made it easier to vote by mail, attracting legal challenges from Trump.  Now, they’re now running for reelection, but the Republican Party is hoping to gain control of this swing county’s commission. 

Also keep an eye on the Democratic efforts to retain majorities in the other Pennsylvania counties they gained in 2019, often for the first time in decades: Delaware, Chester, Lehigh, and Monroe. The GOP would also gain control of the board of elections in Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, if it scores an upset in the county executive race. Sam DeMarco, who signed up as a fake Trump elector in 2020, is already certain to sit on Allegheny County’s board of elections.

Pennsylvania | Berks County commission

Will any Pennsylvania county try to stall the certification of elections next year, in a repeat of Trump’s strategy in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential race? The results of next week’s elections will determine which are susceptible to try out such a strategy, Daniel Nichanian reports in Bolts. Election attorneys told him that this would be a dereliction of duties on the part of county commissioners but that it may still cause some legal and political upheaval. Already in 2022, the Republican commissioners in three counties resisted certifying results because they insisted on rejecting valid mail ballots; they’re now all seeking reelection.

The Democratic challengers running in Berks County—the most politically competitive of these three counties—say this is a key issue in their race. “The most important thing is that we have a board of commissioners that endorses the winner of a campaign,” one of them told Bolts. But they’re also running on a platform of easing mail voting by installing more accessible ballot drop boxes, and instituting new policies to notify residents if their ballots have a clerical error. Also keep an eye on Fayette and Lancaster, the other counties that tried to not certify the 2022 results, and in the many red jurisdictions where candidates with ties to election deniers made it past the Republican primaries.

Virginia | Legislative control

Since Virginia Republicans gained the governorship and state House in 2021, they have passed bills through the lower chamber to repeal same-day voter registration and get rid of ballot drop boxes, among other restrictive measures. Until now, these bills have died in the Democratic-run Senate. But will that change after Nov. 7, when Virginians elect all lawmakers?

The GOP is hoping to gain control of the Senate while defending its majority in the House, Bolts reports, a combination that would hand them full control of the state government and open the floodgates for the party’s conservative agenda on how the commonwealth should run elections. Inversely, if Democrats have a great night—flipping the House and keeping the Senate—they may have more oversight over Governor Glenn Youngkin’s dramatic curtailment of rights restoration and over his administration’s wrongful voter purges; still, those matters are decided within the executive branch, and the governor’s office is not on the ballot until 2025.

Washington | King County director of elections

Only one county in the entire state of Washington is electing its chief administrator. It just so happens to be King County, home to Seattle and more than 2 million residents—in a race that features a staunch election denier, no less. Doug Basler has sowed doubts about Washington state’s election system since the 2020 election, alongside others on the far-right, and he has helped a lawsuit against its mail voting system.

Basler is a heavy underdog on Nov. 7 in his challenge against Julie Wise, the Director of King County Elections. This is a heavily Democratic county, though there will be no partisan label on the ballot, potentially blunting the effect of Basler’s Republican affiliation. Still, Cameron Joseph reports in Bolts that the spread of false election conspiracies—even when they are defeated at the ballot box—is fueling a threatening climate. “It’s a very scary time to be an election administrator,” Wise told Bolts.

The post 10 Local Elections This Month That Matter to Voting Rights appeared first on Bolts.

Memphis residents who head to the polls next week will face a dizzying ballot for mayor. With Mayor Jim Strickland term limited in this city of 600,000, there are 17 candidates running to replace him in this nonpartisan race—a crush of local businessmen and politicians, including a former reality TV judge, two different life coaches, and a former mayor. Despite the crowded field, Oct. 5 will be the only round of voting: Whoever finishes first becomes the next mayor of Memphis, however small their share of the vote. 

Memphis is by far the most populous city in the nation to elect its mayor this way, in a one-round, first-past-the-post election. There is no primary, no runoff, no ranked-choice voting to cull the herd, encourage consolidation, or help clarify the stakes. All other U.S. cities with at least half a million residents have some such mechanism to ensure that the field narrows, or that the winner gets broader support.

This rare voting procedure was set up when a court eliminated runoffs more than 30 years ago to prevent white residents from coalescing to block Black candidates. But the white share of the population has declined considerably since then, rendering that original purpose more obsolete. Voters in this now majority-Black city tried in recent years to change their election rules and adopt ranked-choice voting, a system that could produce winners with wider appeal. But Tennessee Republicans who run the state government adopted a law in 2022 that banned the use of ranked-choice in the state. 

This has left Memphis with a system that risks diluting voters’ power, making it harder for them to elect leaders who represent the preferences and priorities of a large share of the population. 

“There’s still a whole lot of battle fatigue, angst, frustration, anxiety,” says Reverend Earle Fisher, director of the Black Clergy Collective of Memphis, about voters’ mood. “If there’s one thing I’ve heard a million times over the last few months that I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard it is: ‘There’s too many people in this race.’”

He says the danger to democracy is that public officials are getting elected without a mandate, without “50 percent of the people participating saying, ‘I want this person because I believe this person is gonna do the things that the majority of us want to be done.’”

Whoever wins the mayor’s race in Memphis will have to contend with concerns over public safety and economic disinvestment, a shrinking population, and a GOP-run state government that has increasingly interfered in the decisions made by its cities. The election also comes in the wake of Tyre Nichols’ death and other high-profile police shootings that have rocked the city recently, which puts a spotlight on the next mayor’s relationship with the police department and appointments of a police chief.

But in a field that’s this crowded, and where nearly all mayoral contenders say they share the same broad priorities—reduce crime, promote economic investment, and improve housing—it’s been exceedingly difficult for the conversations to go beyond sound bites or to really air out any policy disagreements between any two candidates. 

“Voters don’t really create their own messages. They choose between the alternatives that are put in front of them,” says Jack Santucci, who studies electoral systems as a political science lecturer at Queens College, CUNY. “Especially in a nonpartisan local election, voters are going to have trouble differentiating among the candidates.”

Local media has made decisions about which of these 17 candidates to invite to debates based on how much money they’ve raised and the available polling. 

By those metrics, the leading candidates include Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner, who is touting support from police unions and his long experience in law enforcement, while also  drawing criticism for the high number of deaths in the local jail he oversees. They also include Paul Young, president of the Downtown Memphis Commission, a newcomer to electoral politics who leads the race in funds raised; state Representative Karen Camper, who voted against the law to ban ranked-choice voting while in the legislature; and Shelby County Commissioner Van Turner, a former Memphis NAACP president whose left-leaning platform has earned him the endorsement of Justin Pearson, a lawmaker representing part of the city who was expelled from the state House (and later reinstated) by Republicans earlier this year over a protest for gun control.

Also running is Willie Herenton, who has made fewer appearances at public events, skipped debates, and raised a lot less money. But as the former mayor from 1992 to 2009, the name recognition he garnered over his five terms makes him a frontrunner: In an August poll conducted by Emerson College, Herenton received 16 percent—enough to put him in the lead. A plurality of respondents, 26 percent, remained undecided. 

Even in smaller debates organized by the media, candidates have had limited time to state their cases and have struggled to distinguish themselves. The dynamic has heightened competition, incentivizing attack ads and even jockeying among the candidates over who has the best Christian faith credentials. 

Every possible advantage counts: The next mayor is likely to win with less than 30 percent of the vote, if not less, hardly a mandate from voters to carry out a particular policy vision.

“What we’re facing right now, with so many candidates in the way, is that we could possibly have the next mayor of Memphis elected by 20,000 or fewer votes,” Martavius Jones, chair of the city council, told Bolts.

Tennessee’s other largest city just held its own mayoral race this summer under different rules: Nashville holds runoffs for its local elections, giving the race a much different shape.

There were 12 candidates for mayor during Nashville’s first round of voting on Aug. 3, and the top two vote-getters, Freddie O’Connell and Alice Rolli, received 27 and 20 percent of the vote, respectively. In Memphis, this would have been the end of the road, but in Nashville it paved the way for a 6-week runoff campaign. O’Connell touted his progressive bona fides while Rolli ran with conservative support, a contrast that gave voters a clear choice. During the runoff, O’Connell rallied support from progressive advocacy groups, labor unions, as well as several of the candidates he beat in the first round, and on Sept. 14, won the mayorship with a decisive 64 percent of the vote. 

Republicans in the legislature floated a bill earlier this year to ban runoffs in municipal elections throughout the state. Democrats denounced it as an attempted power-grab in the run-up to Nashville’s election, warning that it would allow a single Republican to beat out a crowd of Democrats in the decidedly blue city. Had the bill passed, the summer’s result would not have changed since O’Connell won both rounds. Still, Rolli, the sole Republican among the major candidates, would have been 7 percentage points from victory rather than the 28 percentage points by which she lost the runoff.

Memphis too used to have runoff elections for its mayoral and city council contest, a system it adopted in the mid 1960s. Because of the city’s racial makeup at the time—63 percent white and 37 percent Black—runoffs worked to preserve white political power and ensured that Black candidates almost never took office. Runoffs were used not only to consolidate votes around just a couple of candidates, but also to shore up racial voting blocs. 

“Blacks could not hope to win citywide races given the traditional level of white polarization and bloc voting,” explains Marcus Pohlmann in his book Racial Politics At a Crossroads, a history of Memphis electoral politics. “Without a runoff, Blacks could have run single candidates in races in which there were several white candidates, and, by giving a candidate a plurality of the vote, have some reasonable possibility of winning.”

Elections continued on this way until in 1991, when a federal judge struck down the runoffs rule, saying that it violated the Voting Rights Act. U.S. District Judge Jerome Turner said the city had to adopt a new plan to “eradicate the minority vote dilution.” 

Mere months later, Herenton was elected as the city’s first Black mayor—by a hair, with only 142 more votes than his opponent, white incumbent Richard Hackett. The contest was decided in one round, and a runoff very well could have reversed the results, Pohlmann writes.

The racial makeup of Memphis has changed considerably since then; the U.S. census’ 2022 estimates show that 63 percent of the city’s population is Black and 24 percent is white. This has largely eliminated the concern of “minority vote dilution” that the 1991 ruling was intended to address. Still, the no-runoffs rule has remained. 

Memphians have devised other informal ways of consolidating the field in intervening years, including holding an unofficial mock election called the Memphis People’s Convention, also known as the People’s Primary. The event was originally put on ahead of the historic 1991 race, and had the effect of galvanizing Black voters around Herenton. 

After a long hiatus, the event was brought back in 2019 by the Black Clergy Collective of Memphis as a way to engage and inform voters, give candidates an opportunity to make their case, and signal who the leading candidates might be. 

“It’s been important for us not to concentrate on individuals or politicians as much as we concentrate on issues and policies that the majority of the people want to see enacted,” says Fisher of theBlack Clergy Collective.

This year, only six candidates registered for the event, which took place in August, and only two candidates—Young, the president of the downtown commission, and Turner, the former Memphis NAACP president—showed up in person. Young won the mock election, though Fisher stresses that many Memphians remain undecided. 

Lexi Carter, chair of the Shelby County Democratic Party, agrees that the People’s Convention this year is less of a political bellwether compared to the first convention in 1991. 

“That was effective then, but I think as the years passed the dynamics changed,” Carter told Bolts. She says that people engaged in 1991 “because it was the first time a Black mayor was ever going to be elected. Whereas now, there are African Americans that fill most of the elected positions [in city government.]” The leading candidates in the race this year are all Black and have some attachment to the Democratic party.

The Shelby Democratic Party has largely stayed out of this race, as they have a policy of not endorsing candidates in non-partisan races such as this one, where most candidates are registered Democrats or have Democratic affiliations. “It’s really a very close race and difficult to predict,” says Carter.

As an alternative to the current system, Memphis has tried to adopt ranked choice voting. This voting method, in which voters rank all candidates in order of preference instead of choosing just one, helps ensure that whoever wins has at least some level of support from most voters. 

Memphis residents first approved ranked choice with 71 percent of the vote in a 2008 referendum. The city didn’t move to implement it until 2017, though, when Shelby County Elections Administrator Linda Philips announced plans to use it in the 2019 elections. But members of the city council raised concerns about whether voting equipment could handle the change, and Tennessee’s election director Mark Goins halted Philips’ plan, issuing an opinion saying that ranked-choice voting violated state law. The Memphis city council put another referendum on the ballot for 2018, this time asking voters whether they wanted to repeal ranked-choice voting, but that referendum failed when 54 percent of voters rejected repeal. 

In 2022, the legislature stepped in to ban ranked-choice voting throughout Tennessee with a law sponsored by Republican state Senator Brian Kelsey, who represents parts of Shelby County. Many Democratic lawmakers who represent portions of Memphis voted against the ban, including Camper, the state Representative who is now running for mayor.

“I voted against the bill because the people of my community were for ranked choice voting. We chose it for ourselves,” Camper told Bolts in an email. 

“The legislature likes to lean on and meddle in the affairs of Memphis and Nashville,” she added. “I believe that this is one more way to override the will of Memphis and Shelby County.”

Fisher, who has supported the adoption of ranked-choice voting in Memphis, says he was disappointed to see the option removed. 

“I wanna do whatever we can do to ensure that whoever is elected to office, the probability of them representing the will of the majority of the citizens is high and not low,” he told Bolts.

With the path to ranked-choice voting now blocked, one prominent local Democrat is proposing another path to reform: introducing partisan primaries. Jones, the city council president, recently introduced an ordinance that, if passed, would put a popular referendum on the ballot in 2024 to set up a system that would have parties nominating candidates before they face a general election. Mayoral elections in Memphis are currently nonpartisan.

Jones says his ordinance is motivated by the size of the mayoral race, though in a city that is as staunchly blue as Memphis, a one-round Democratic primary could still reproduce some of the current system’s crowding issues. Jones says a partisan primary setting would still help condense the field and encourage candidates to adhere to party values.

He also says it’s less complicated and uncertain than petitioning a court to allow them to bring back runoffs. “Some of the feedback that I’ve received from people has been that there are just way too many people in the race,” said Jones. “So just by doing a partisan basis for selecting the mayor, we avoid having to go to court.”

The Shelby County Democratic Party has endorsed the measure. “We would much prefer to have the opportunity to choose our candidate,” Carter told Bolts. “When we have a nominee in advance, we can really get behind one individual and put all of our resources there, instead of dividing our resources between 16 or 17 people.”

Jones’ proposal has not yet been brought up for discussion by the full city council. It’s not likely to come up until after this election is over. 

“It’s a beautiful thing that we have the freedom that anybody who meets the qualifications can get in the race,” said Jones. “I don’t have a problem with that. But when it comes down to making that mayoral decision, let’s make it simple.”

The post With 17 Candidates and Unusual Voting Rules, Memphis Mayoral Race Gets Jumbled appeared first on Bolts.

In Michigan and Connecticut, they made it easier for people to vote early in future elections. In at least six localities, voters adopted ranked-choice voting. Oakland, California, adopted a new experiment in leveling the playing field in campaign spending. And other measures will try out new approaches to increasing participation locally. 

“It’s great to see voters embracing pro-democracy reforms to make the voting process easier and more inclusive,” Josh Douglas, a University of Kentucky professor who specializes in election law and was watching a wide array of ballot measures on Tuesday, told Bolts. “When we make it easy to vote, and when turnout improves as a result, then democracy wins.”

The biggest expansion of ballot access on Tuesday comes with the passage of Michigan’s Proposal 2, a catchall measure that amends the state constitution to make voting easier while also protecting against efforts to curtail voting rights launched in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. 

The proposal, backed by a coalition of Michigan organizations that support expanding voting rights, will establish nine days of early in-person voting, create new mandates for townships to set up ballot drop boxes, and supply state-funded postage to vote by mail. It passed handily with 60 percent of the vote.

“It’s the role of our government to make sure people have the ability to vote and aren’t bogged down by constructed barriers,” Branden Snyder, co-executive director of a Detroit group backing the measure, told Bolts in October. 

Yvonne White, president of NAACP Michigan, another member of the coalition, celebrated the result this week, stating in a press release that, “Proposal 2 helps to ensure that every eligible voter in Michigan will have their vote counted without intimidation, harassment or interference.”

Early voting also notched a win in Connecticut, which has some of the nation’s strictest rules for people who hope to vote before an Election Day; voters there adopted a constitutional amendment that authorizes the legislature to set up early voting. (It does not mandate this, unlike Michigan’s.)

At the local level, voters adopted a variety of innovations in campaign and voting procedures, with an eye to revitalizing democracy. Oakland, California passed a measure to revamp campaign finance and implement a democracy vouchers program in future local elections. It leads with 69 percent of the vote as of publication.

The program would provide each eligible voter with four $25 vouchers to donate to the candidate of their choice for upcoming city and school board elections, Bolts reported in July. Proponents of Measure W, modeled after a similar one that passed in Seattle in 2017, hope to draw more residents into the electoral process as small donors and candidates, while also increasing transparency in campaign finance. Since Seattle implemented its program, it has seen a 350 percent increase in the number of donors per race, and the pool of candidates in local races has diversified.

Other provisions in Measure W would lower the cap on campaign contributions for city races to $600, and require campaign ads to list their top three contributors. Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, which supported the measure, says democratizing campaign funding is a means of democratizing the governing process.

“We have hyper concentrated political giving in the hands of a tiny and totally non-representative slice of Oakland,” Stein told Bolts. “The majority of Oakland, which is working class and communities of color, has virtually no political giving power—and that changes who can run for and win, and it changes what ideas are taken seriously.”

Oakland also appeared poised to adopt a separate initiative to enable noncitizen residents who have children in city schools to vote in school board races. Noncitizen voting, which has long existed in some localities around the country, has spread over the past year, including to some municipalities in Vermont. But voters in Oregon’s Multnomah County turned down a measure on the issue on Tuesday, and Ohio voters adopted a constitutional amendment to ban noncitizen voting in local and state elections. 

In San Francisco, California, and Boulder, Colorado, voters approved proposals to move city elections from odd-numbered to even-numbered years so that they coincide with federal and statewide elections, which will boost turnout.

And at least six jurisdictions nationwide voted to institute new ranked-choice voting systems. Proponents of the procedure, which asks people to rank candidates by order of preference rather than just opt for one, say it helps better reflect voters’ preferences.

Ranked-choice measures appear to have passed in Ojaj, California; Fort Collins, Colorado; Evanston, Illinois; Portland, Maine; Portland, Oregon; and Multnomah County, Oregon (which includes Portland). In Washington State, Clark and San Juan counties rejected ranked-choice voting, and the fate of a similar measure in Seattle was inconclusive as of publication.

But all eyes were in Nevada, a critical swing state voting on whether to adopt ranked-choice voting for state and congressional races; Alaska and Maine are the only states that already do this. Ballot Question 3 leads by 3 percentage points as of publication, with remaining ballots likely to lean in its favor. (Update: The Nevada Independent called the referendum in favor of Question 3 on Nov. 11.)

Before ranked-choice voting comes to Nevada, though, voters would need to approve it a second time in 2024 due to the state’s multi-year process for adopting constitutional amendments.

As Bolts reported in September, establishment politicians from both parties criticized the measure as too complicated and confusing for voters. But proponents of Question 3, which would also get rid of the state’s closed primaries, saw it as shifting power away from big-party politics and back to voters in a state where the largest plurality of voters are either nonpartisan or members of a minority party. 

According to FairVote, a national organization that supports ranked-choice voting, Tuesday’s results mean that there are now 61 jurisdictions that will use ranked-choice voting in their elections. Critical elections, including a U.S. Senate race in Alaska, a U.S. House race in Maine, and the DA race in San Francisco, are set to be resoled by ranked-choice voting in coming weeks.

The energy around these democracy measures come at the same time that voting rights have come under attack. 

Michigan’s ballot proposal was written to include defensive measures against the attacks on election systems that emerged from the Trumpian lie that the 2020 election results in Michigan were invalid. Conspiracies about widespread fraud resulted in at least one county canvasser board resisting certifying election results, outside groups calling for an independent audit of statewide results, and Republican legislators introducing a slate of bills that hemmed in people’s ability to access the ballot. 

The drafters of Proposal 2 countered each of these attempts with a specific reform. A 2021 petition to conduct an independently-funded “forensic audit” of 2020 election results, for example, was met with a provision in the ballot measure establishing that only election officials can conduct audits.  

Also on Tuesday, Michigan Democrats gained control of the state government for the first time in nearly 40 years by flipping the state legislature, and they also maintained control of the governorship and state Supreme Court, which may aid the measure’s implementation given Democrats’ broader support for these reforms.

And a candidate who was running to take over election administration in Michigan on a platform of similar conspiracies handily lost on Tuesday in the secretary of state race. (Many other election deniers fared very poorly around the country.)

The fate of some ballot measures remained uncertain as of Thursday. In Arizona, measures to tighten voter ID requirements or make it harder to pass future initiatives were unresolved as of publication, with hundreds of thousands of ballots left to process.

The article has been updated on Nov. 11 with more information about elections in Nevada and San Francisco.

The post The Ballot Measures That Revamped Voting on Tuesday appeared first on Bolts.

Palin’s reaction mirrors the worry, shared by both parties’ establishments, that ranked choice voting is making election outcomes more unpredictable at a time when high-profile races are more foreseeable than ever based on partisanship.

Now ranked choice voting is up for voter approval in Nevada, one of the nation’s most competitive states.

Question 3, which would amend the Nevada Constitution to implement a system similar to Alaska’s ranked choice voting, faces a bipartisan chorus of high-profile critics in the state, from the GOP chair to the state’s Democratic governor and both Democratic U.S. senators. 

Like in Alaska, the amendment would set up a two-round system. First, it would make all candidates for congressional, gubernatorial, state executive and legislative contests run in a single primary open to all voters. The top five vote getters would then advance to the general election, where a second change would take effect: ranked choice voting, where voters can rank all five candidates on the ballot. 

Despite attempts by critics to disqualify the initiative, the Nevada Supreme Court in June ruled 4-3 to let the proposed changes, known collectively as Final-Five Voting, onto the November ballot. The issue will now go before the one group that appears most excited about the reform: the public. A poll from August showed that Nevada voters support Question 3 by a 15-point margin (though nearly a third of voters say they neither support nor oppose the idea). Because the measure requires an amendment to the state constitution, it must pass this November and then again in 2024. If it passes both elections, Final-Five Voting would take effect in the 2026 election cycle.

Even small changes could tilt the balance of power in Nevada, a Democratic-controlled battleground state that was led by a Republican governor, legislature, and U.S. Senator as recently as 2016. However, neither the political dynamics nor the arguments against ranked choice voting are unique to Nevada. 

Whether it’s Democrats or Republicans, the political establishment often fights RCV, and they tend to offer the same justifications: it’s confusing, potentially discriminatory, and, especially after Alaska’s recent experience with ranked choice voting, unfair. 

These criticisms are especially pressing as RCV grows. In 2010, only eight major cities used ranked choice. As of July 2022, it’s used in two states, one county, and 53 cities, which are home to over 11 million voters, according to FairVote, a nonprofit advocating for RCV nationwide.  

This November, nine other jurisdictions have an RCV initiative on the ballot. Nevada is the only one that includes open primaries as well, but two others—Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine—would implement RCV on top of proportional representation, which is a “silver bullet toward gerrymandering,” says Deb Otis, director of research at FairVote, which advocates for ranked choice voting. 

Proponents of Final-Five Voting in Nevada argue that open primaries and RCV are particularly well suited for the state’s political landscape. About 37 percent of voters are registered with a minor party or as nonpartisan, which is greater than both registered Democrats (33 percent) and Republicans (30 percent). Meanwhile, the state has been so gerrymandered that about half  of state legislative primaries were uncontested this year.

And where there have been competitive races, the winner often earns less than the majority. Steve Sisolak won the governorship in 2018 with 49.4 percent of the vote, and Catherine Cortez Masto won her U.S. Senate seat in 2016 with 47.1 percent.

Ranked choice voting would ensure that the winner has majority support. If no candidate earns more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, the bottom vote getter is eliminated, and their second-choice votes are redistributed to the other candidates. That process continues until someone takes the majority. 

“RCV rewards both deep support as evidenced by a high number of first rankings, and broad support, as evidenced by many backup rankings,” writes Steven Hill, co-founder of FairVote.

Critics like Sisolak argue that the ranking process is confusing for voters, especially voters of color, although at least one study suggests little difference in how racial and ethnic groups understand the process. Otis argues that RCV can prevent the kind of vote dilution that can obstruct candidates of color. She points to the recent Democratic congressional primary in Detroit, which is 80 percent Black. There were nine candidates running, and after voters split their votes between multiple Black contenders, a non-Black candidate won with around 28 percent of the vote. Now, Detroit will likely not have Black representation in Congress for the first time since the early 1950s.

“Once they get to know the candidate field, people tend to know, ‘Oh, I like these three,’ ‘I’d be ok with these three,’ and ‘I really don’t want these three,’” she says. “But we’re locked into a ballot style where we cannot express that.” 

In terms of difficulty, voters also reported few problems in the most recent high-profile ranked choice voting election, the Alaska special election triggered by the death of U.S. Representative Don Young. Ninety-five percent of voters surveyed by Alaskans for Better Elections said that they’d received instructions on how to rank their choices before filling out their ballots. Only 6 percent said that the system was “very difficult” to use. Eighty-five percent said it was “somewhat” or “very” simple. 

After nearly 50 candidates ran in the election’s first stage in June, four moved to the August runoff to be decided by ranked choice voting. One dropped out, leaving in Peltola the Democrat and two Republicans: Palin and Nick Begich. 

In the first round of the ranked choice voting, Peltola received about 40 percent of the vote; the two Republicans combined for about 60 percent, with Palin coming in second. When Begich’s voters were transferred to other candidates, though, Peltola clinched a win over Palin, 51 to 49 percent.

To Palin, this was evidence that something went awry: The victory of a Democrat, Palin says, has “disenfranchised” the 60 percent of first-round voters who opted for a Republican. 

But voters select candidates, not parties. Just half of Begich voters chose Palin as their second choice, and nearly 30 percent flipped and went to Peltola.

When unpopular candidates with a ceiling to their support like Palin prevail in a primary, they often lose a lot of voters their party would otherwise expect to win in a general election, which leads to upsets. The Begich voters who voted for Peltola may fall in that familiar category. 

But the remaining 21 percent didn’t rank anyone else, meaning their ballot was “exhausted” in the final round of the election between Palin and Peltola, and played no role. Critics of ranked-choice voting generally fault the system for producing too many of these “exhausted” ballots, leaving some unable to influence the decisive round. 

David O’Brien, policy counsel for RepresentUs, says choosing how many people to rank is part of what people get to decide. “We shouldn’t assume people don’t rank every candidate because they’re confused or don’t understand the process,” he says. “If voters don’t choose to rank every candidate, that’s their choice.”

Still, about eight percent of all voters who participated in Alaska’s August primaries did not have a preference registered in the final round that settled the House winner. That’s an unusually high rate for a high-profile election. In the past two cycles in November 2018, and 2020, no more than 2.5 percent of Alaskans who went to the polls skipped voting in the U.S. House general election. Now, Peltola, Begich, and Palin are all running again in a regularly-scheduled election in November, and Republicans think they can do better with fewer “exhausted” ballots. They are urging voters to “rank the red” to ensure that either Palin or Begich wins.

If Nevada switches to a similar system, it may shuffle the partisan calculations of the state’s usually-tight general elections. 

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, says Katherine Gehl, who founded The Institute for Political Innovation, which has led the campaign for Final-Five Voting in Nevada this year. 

She argues that, because the status quo guarantees the dominance of both major political parties, especially in gerrymandered districts without competitive primaries, politicians have little incentive to deliver results for voters. In that sense, Final Five is as much about changing the behavior or lawmakers as it about voters. “The threat of new competition in any industry, that really drives progress,” she says.  

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