With a historic number of open all-candidate primary initiatives on the ballot, 2024 is poised to be remembered as the year voters demanded a better way to conduct elections. This type of electoral innovation is exactly what the founders intended.
Most people agree that immigration , the national debt, and education are urgent problems, yet year after year these issues go unaddressed. More often than not, politicians would rather use these issues as political cudgels to win the next election rather than achieve a legislative outcome that improves the lives of their constituents. And they do so because the closed primary system incentivizes political grandstanding over the hard work of legislating solutions.
Fortunately, the founders gave us the tools to fix these problems. A record number of states — particularly the conservative strongholds of South Dakota, Idaho, and Montana — are pursuing ballot initiatives to make government more accountable. Each aims to replace traditional party primaries with all-candidate primaries, ensuring all voters have the freedom to vote for any candidate, regardless of party, in every taxpayer-funded election. Four states, including Alaska and Louisiana, already have such a system.
Some fear that this will give one party an advantage. But the group that will benefit the most is independent voters. Currently making up 43% of voters, they are the largest voting bloc in the country.
Independents will inevitably decide the 2024 election, yet nearly 24 million of them in 22 states were locked out of the presidential primary. That includes millions of veterans, half of whom identify as political independents. In the states with closed presidential primaries, the share of voters not registered with a major party has increased by nearly 20% since 2010.
It’s not just independents leading the charge for a different primary process. Grassroots Republicans are behind these efforts as well because they realize that their success will lead to more free, fair, and secure elections for all voters.
In Idaho, for example, there are two ballot initiatives this November that would improve their elections: one to abolish party primaries and replace them with open all-candidate primaries, and the other to ensure only citizens can vote. Five other states — Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, and South Dakota — are pursuing similar measures to strengthen and safeguard our electoral system.
Partisan actors have falsely labeled open primary ballot initiatives and related voter-led movements as shams to help Democrats. Not only has electoral reform received bipartisan support in places where it has been enacted, but conservatives continue to be successful under these improved systems. Of the 15 states with “open primaries,” 11 have Republican governors. Louisiana, one of the four states that did away with party primaries entirely, just elected a governor who ran on a “MAGA-style agenda.”
And in 2021, the Virginia GOP updated its nominating process to incorporate more voices within the party and ended up choosing Glenn Youngkin. Youngkin went on to be the first Republican to win the governor’s seat since Bob McDonnell in 2010, a GOP victory that may not have happened without reform.
When Alaska switched from a traditional closed primary system to nonpartisan primaries, strong conservatives were elected statewide. Most prominently, Gov. Mike Dunleavy enjoys strong approval ratings and has a track record of conservative policy wins for Alaskans. The one statewide Democrat that was elected in Alaska has been noted for her bipartisan work, notably on expanding energy exploration in Alaska, much to the consternation of the Biden administration.
And while Democratic Party leaders often claim to be the “party of democracy,” their vociferous opposition to similar proposals for fairer elections in Colorado, Nevada, and South Dakota expose their hypocrisy as they put up perpetual roadblocks to accountability and ballot box access to citizens in those states.
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Thanks to the founders’ wisdom, the Constitution grants states the right to determine the "time, place, and manner" of elections. Since then, states have led the way in making our elections freer and fairer, allowing the direct election of senators, removing arbitrary literacy tests, and expanding voting rights to nonlandowners, women, and African Americans.
That’s the beauty of our federalist system. By further inviting more people to have a role in the electoral experiment the founders envisioned, we move closer to a more representative America. This November offers an opportunity for millions of people in six more states to make that vision a reality.
Nick Troiano is the author of The Primary Solution: Rescuing Our Democracy From the Fringes and the executive director of Unite America, a philanthropic venture fund that invests in nonpartisan election reform.
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