As Donald Trump and Republicans scored massive victories on election day, Americans in several states rejected ballot initiatives to curb extreme partisan gerrymandering and implement open primaries and ranked-choice voting.
Ohio voters decisively rejected a ballot measure that would have stripped lawmakers of their ability to draw electoral districts and given it to a 15-person bipartisan commission of ordinary citizens. The vote came after Republicans, who control the legislature and redistricting process, ignored the state supreme court seven times to draw districts that heavily favored Republicans.
Voters in seven states – Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and South Dakota – all rejected ballot measures that would have done away with party primaries and replaced them with a non-partisan primary in which the top vote-getters would advance to the general election. Several of the measures would have implemented ranked-choice voting for the general election.
The defeats were somewhat surprising. Ballot initiatives to curb partisan gerrymandering and implement electoral reforms have been broadly successful in recent years. Bipartisan momentum around them has built, especially after Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
But the failures this year show that momentum may be stalling. Opposition to ranked-choice voting has grown more organized, led by a network linked to Leonard Leo, the influential conservative who has wielded enormous influence in shaping the US supreme court.
“In retrospect, it looks like it was always going to be a tough year for these pro-democracy ballot measures,” said Deb Otis, the director of FairVote, a non-profit that supports ranked-choice voting. “The presidential election was looming heavily over voters and with a large number of ballot measures in some of these states. I think maybe voters defaulted to a no position on new concepts.
“I also think the ranked-choice measures were harmed by an increasingly well-organized national opposition,” she added. “This opposition is driven by funders and organizations that have sown uncertainty in our elections for years. These are the same forces behind [the] ‘stop the steal’ [movement] and election denialism.”
In Ohio, there seemed to be broad support for Issue 1 – the proposal to create an independent redistricting commission. The measure had the endorsement of the state’s major newspapers. Supporters heavily outraised opponents by a nearly eight-to-one ratio. The most prominent public figure behind the amendment was the recently retired chief justice of the Ohio supreme court, a Republican. And in the weeks leading up to the election, 69% of voters said they opposed gerrymandering.
But it was opponents of the measure who had the biggest advantage of all.
In August, the Republican-controlled Ohio ballot board crafted extremely misleading language that voters would see when they read their ballots. Even though the ballot measure would have barred drawing districts “that favor one political party and disfavor others”, the board-approved wording told voters the panel would be “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio”. The language was later upheld by the Republican-controlled Ohio supreme court.
Proponents of the amendment said the effort was a thinly veiled attempt to confuse voters – and it worked. Voters told the radio station WOSU and the news site Bolts that they voted no on the amendment thinking they were casting a vote to outlaw gerrymandering.
Jen Miller, the executive director of the Ohio chapter of the League of Women Voters, said the ballot language was so misleading that she wasn’t sure one could even compare the failure of the amendment in the state to other measures that came up short.
“You could functionally argue that every person who voted on Issue 1 was voting to end gerrymandering. But that the disinformation campaign of the opposition, as well as the shockingly false descriptions that voters saw on their ballots, is what made our reform lose,” she said. “I am completely sure that this does not reflect the will of the voters in Ohio. Absent disinformation and terribly misleading ballot language, Issue 1 would have won.”
Matt Dole, a spokesperson for the campaign against the Ohio ballot measure, said that when the opposition campaign began polling, it looked like the measure was going to pass easily. “It was ahead by leaps and bounds,” he said.
He pointed to the language written by the ballot board as a key reason why the measure failed.
“You have the ‘yes on 1’ side that had ‘ban gerrymandering’ on their yard signs, and the ‘no on 1’ side had ‘stop gerrymandering’ on their yard signs,” he said in an interview. He added he didn’t think his campaign’s messaging was misleading because the term was somewhat subjective.
In Idaho, Proposition 1 would have done away with the current system in which a voter can only vote in the party primary if they are registered. Instead, it proposed implementing an open primary in which the top four vote-getters advanced to the general election. Voters would then rank their choices in the general election, and there would be an instant runoff to determine who wins. The idea is that the system reduces polarization by forcing politicians to appeal to a wide swath of voters instead of just a narrow section of their base.
Idaho voters rejected the measure by 40 points.
“It proved to be much easier than we thought for opponents of the reform to paint the entire effort as partisan in spite of our best efforts to persuade the public that these are non-partisan ideas that benefit all voters regardless of party,” said Luke Mayville, a spokesperson for Idahoans for Open Primaries. “In a hyper-partisan political environment where the other party isn’t just wrong, they’re evil, it was extremely difficult to break through with a non-partisan message especially on an issue focused on elections.”
In Arizona, the citizen-initiated Proposition 140 would have amended the state constitution to allow for open primaries. Lawmakers put another measure, Proposition 133, on the ballot that would have amended the state’s constitution to preserve the current primary system. The point wasn’t actually to pass the measure, but to confuse voters, EJ Montini, a columnist with the Arizona Republic, wrote.
Trent England, co-chair of the Leo-linked Stop RCV coalition, which advocates against ranked-choice voting, said he thought one message that was particularly effective against the measures was emphasizing out-of-state funding for them. “I think when you have that problem in a ballot measure campaign, spending more money actually can start to hurt you because people start saying, ‘Oh yeah, there’s another one of those slick campaign commercials,” he said.
Otis of FairVote said she was certain that the push for ranked-choice voting would continue despite the losses this fall.
“The path to reform is not a straight line,” she said. “As the dust settles here, one of the lessons we can take away is doing a better job of communicating the benefits for voters and for elected officials to help neutralize some of that opposition.”
