Fix Florida’s flawed primary election
Andrew Gillum’s well-earned surprise victory in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for governor comes with an obvious disadvantage. Nearly two-thirds of Democratic voters preferred other candidates.
That’s not to say Gillum couldn’t have won them over in a runoff. But there is no runoff. The Legislature’s Republicans repealed it 13 years ago over mostly Democratic opposition.
The nays foresaw and feared what happened this week: One party emerged from the primaries with a majority nominee. Republican congressman Ron DeSantis of Jacksonville won his race over Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, 56-35.
But Gillum starts out with only a 34 percent plurality, just three points more than the runner-up in the five-person race.
Worse for Gillum, DeSantis polled 305,694 more votes than Gillum did.
It was inevitable this would happen, given the Republicans’ superior intraparty discipline. It’s only surprising that it took so long.
This was the first governor’s race without a runoff in which there were more than three plausible Democratic candidates. Four pulled votes in the six figures.
Gillum’s path to victory over DeSantis will require a herculean effort at party unity as well as intense cultivation of the more than 3.5 million independent or minority party voters who had no say in Tuesday’s closed primaries.
Two conclusions need to be drawn from this election, regardless of who wins in November.
One, Florida deserves some form of open primary system. It doesn’t have to be like California’s, a top-two primary where the November nominees might come from the same party. North Carolina’s system is a reasonable example. Voters who don’t register in one of the five recognized parties — Democratic, Constitution, Green, Libertarian or Republican — can choose to vote in one of those primaries.
Secondly, there should be some form of runoff that allows both parties to put forth candidates who can fairly claim to be consensus nominees. That doesn’t mean a return to the old runoff, three weeks after the primary, when poll workers were often as lonely as the old fictional Maytag repairman. The modern alternative is rankedchoice voting, sometimes referred to an instant runoff.
Maine voters, known for their independence, have now voted twice for this system in their elections and it worked with no problems in the June primaries.
A constitutional glitch keeps it from use in Maine’s general election for governor, but it will be used in November to elect members of the U.S. House and Senate.
Its big problem is that it took eight days to certify the winners. But that’s because Maine doesn’t allow electronic transmission of vote totals from the polls to the capital.
They have to be transported in the form of flash drives or bundles of actual ballots, and Maine doesn’t begin counting until all the ballots are certified. Once the counting starts, though, the computers rank the choices and announce the winners almost instantly.
Florida could easily devise a system that yields results far more rapidly.
By way of illustration, here’s how Maine’s system worked to select a Democratic nominee from among seven candidates in June. (The Republican nominee won an outright majority.)
Attorney General Janet Mills led with 33.3 percent. The computer then counted the second-choice votes cast. She wound up with a 54.2 percent majority of first and second choice votes, compared to 45.9 percent for her runner-up.
“We’re very pleased that this went so smoothly,” said Matt Dunlap, Maine’s secretary of state. “I think people can trust the system.”
Ranked-choice voting has three advantages over Florida’s old primary and lowparticipation runoff.
One is that there’s no falloff in voting. Another is that neither the person who finishes first nor the runner-up is guaranteed of becoming the consensus candidate. Those with strong negatives might not poll many second-choice votes. The third, obviously, is that it puts pressure on competitors to be nice. It would be rash to slam an opponent when one might need the second-choice votes of his or her supporters.
Fewer bruises, faster healing, a fairer representation of most voters’ wishes. Both of Florida’s major parties should want that. So should every voter.