This year on the ballot for the governor’s race we have a candidate broadly acceptable to most voters, a candidate repugnant to most voters, an independent with little traction, and a few other candidates few people have heard of. This is crazy.
There’s also a Libertarian running in the 8th Congressional who could potentially affect the outcome (we’ll see soon enough).
In our semi-open primary (unaffiliated voters can choose their party primary ballot), Democrat Phil Weiser beat Michael Bennet by 505,459 votes to 383,138 votes.
Meanwhile, on the Republican side, Victor Marx won with 208,458 votes, while Barbara Kirkmeyer got 205,992 votes, and Scott Bottoms got 108,535 votes.
Absurdly, the Unity Party’s Jeff Peckman made the general-election ballot with a paltry 146 votes.
In other words, Bennet did not make the general-election ballot, and Marx did, even though Bennet got 84% more primary votes than Marx.
And it’s a good bet that, with approval voting on the Republican side (vote for as many candidates as you want), enough Bottoms voters also would have picked Kirkmeyer to put her over the top. (Although Marx and Bottoms are comparably crazy, Bottoms did not like Marx.)
Then there’s the issue of low primary participation. A total of 1,411,947 people voted in the June 30 primary for governor. If we look at the Secretary of State’s June statistics for voter registration, we find there were 4,673,350 total registered voters and 4,088,906 active voters. In other words, only 35% of active voters bothered to return a primary ballot for governor.
And this was a high-participation year of 36%! In 2024, a mere 26% of active voters participated in the primary, whereas 80% of active voters participated in the general.
Our voting rules are substantially undemocratic and extremely stupid. Here I want to outline a couple of avenues for reform.
Primaries are expensive, time-consuming, needlessly demanding of voter attention, and ill-suited to democratic outcomes.
Maybe we should just get rid of them.
If we have only a general election, we’ll have to deal with the possibility of more, stronger candidates on the ballot. Here’s how I propose we deal with that.
We want to maintain relatively simple ballots that are easy to understand, along with voting rules that tend to favor candidates with broad appeal.
The simplest ballot, other than the “select only one” ballots we have now, is with approval voting, in which people can vote for as many candidates as they like. The problem is that if we end up with two strong candidates from the same ideological camp (say, Weiser and Bennet) people cannot express a preference between the two while still preferring either to anyone else.
I propose a slightly more complicated ballot, but one still easy to understand and a lot simpler than ballots using ranked-choice or other complex ranking systems.
I propose a three-tier selection of “prefer,” “accept,” and “reject.” Then, for example, a Democratic voter could “prefer” Weiser, “accept” Bennet, and “reject” Marx.
So you vote your ballot with the three-tier system. Then, for the election, if there are more than two candidates, the two candidates with the most “prefer or “accept” votes make the final tabulation round. Then, if someone voted to “prefer” Weiser but merely “accept” Bennet, that person’s vote goes toward Weiser.
This is a good plan, it’s elegant, it’s relatively simple to implement and understand, and it’s robust enough to well-reveal voter preferences. Sure, you can come up with quirky cases where we could argue about whether the outcome is optimal. But that’s the case with every possible voting system, and my proposal is way better than the ridiculous, obviously terrible system we now use.
Under my proposed reforms, government would not track anyone’s party affiliation, list party affiliation on the ballot, or in any way give parties special privileges or subsidies. Ballot-access rules would be the same for all comers, presumably based on petitions (as we have now), preferably integrating a means for online or at least mail-in signatures.
What then would be the role of parties? They could hold their own conventions or primaries if they wanted. But there would be no enforcement mechanism for party results, other than the party kicking people out or otherwise sanctioning them within the party.
To take the current case, after a relatively small number of Republican crazies selected Marx, Kirkmeyer either could have played ball with the party and withdrawn from the race, or she could have said, “This is stupid. I’m staying in the race, dropping out of the Republican Party, and running without that party’s support.”
Parties could adjust their events around the official, universal ballot deadlines, such that candidates either could wait to gather signatures, or else earn a spot on the ballot but reserve the right to withdraw by an official deadline. From the perspective of government officials, party membership and party approval would be entirely irrelevant to ballot access.
Under this system, perhaps, after Weiser beat Bennet, Bennet, wanting to remain a Democrat in good standing, still would have withdrawn. But I suspect Kirkmeyer would have strongly considered dropping the party to stay in the race, given the profound weakness of Marx as a candidate outside a small band of party loyalists and religious zealots.
Meanwhile, third-party candidates no longer could play the role of “spoiler.” If someone wants to “prefer” (say) the Libertarian and “accept” the Republican (or the Democrat), great.
Ballot simplicity is a big deal. A voter is supposed to select only one of the three options. But what if a voter gets confused and puts “prefer” and “accept” for a candidate? We could default that vote to “prefer,” the stronger preference. On the other hand, if a voter incoherently put “prefer” or “accept” along with “reject” for a given candidate, that would be the same as “reject.” A lack of vote for a given candidate would count the same as “reject.” This is only slightly more complicated than what we now have and way simpler and more forgiving than various alternatives.
On the other hand, a general-election ballot with many candidates would be hard for voters to navigate. Voters tend not to pay much attention, and indeed tend to be either “rationally ignorant” or “rationally irrational” (meaning roughly that they use politics to express identity rather than to sensibly govern).
Maybe it’s a good thing, or at least not so bad, to let a relatively small, politically engaged minority participate in a government-run primary in order to winnow the field. That said, with more real choices in the primary, probably more people would participate in it.
If we’re going to keep a primary, it should be open, with the same ballot-access rules for everyone, and without deference to parties.
One possibility is to use simple approval voting in the primary, then advance the top two candidates to the general. This would generate a clean, simple general-election ballot. This year, that probably would have yielded a race between Weiser and Bennet.
Alternately, we could say that every candidate who gets approval of at least one-fourth of voters advances to the general, except in any case at least two candidates advance. This year, that probably would have resulted in a three-way race between Weiser, Bennet, and Kirkmeyer.
Then, for a general election with more than two candidates, we could use either simple approval voting or else the three-tier system described above.
An open, government-sponsored primary probably would make party primaries irrelevant. On the other hand, if we dropped government-run primaries altogether, perhaps party primaries would play a large role in winnowing the field, albeit without any government participation or enforcement.
We can recognize proper limits to democratic power while still holding broadly democratic institutions as crucial for the peaceful transfer of power and for holding government accountable to “we the people.” Our system usually works okay but has well-recognized failures. The reforms I’ve outlined would result in more stable, more appropriately democratic governance.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
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