Alaska reforms voting; Florida, please copy

Of the five Republican senators who voted to proceed with the trial of former president Donald Trump, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is the only one up for re-election next year. Trump, who won the state by 10 points, predictably threatened to have his cult defeat her in the primary. But the advantage will be hers.

That’s because of a dramatic election reform initiative that Alaska voters narrowly approved on Nov. 3. It’s for Florida to envy.

It replaces the party primaries with an open primary that will nominate the top four vote-getters regardless of party. In the general election, ranked-choice voting will produce a consensus winner. If none of the four gets a majority of first-place votes, second-choice votes will be counted in what will be, in effect, an instant runoff.

That’s to the great benefit of independent voters and moderates of both parties, and an obstacle to extremists like Trump.

Reformers hoped to do much the same in Florida with Amendment 3, the initiative proposing a top-two open primary, but it failed Nov. 3 despite having 1.4 million more votes for than against it. It was some 364,000 votes short of the necessary 60 percent supermajority. Ironically, it was more popular than either major presidential candidate.

We hear the sponsors intend to try again, despite the mounting costs and obstacles the Legislature has thrown up against initiative campaigns in Florida. That’s good news. This time, perhaps the League of Women Voters of Florida won’t desert the side of the angels.

Amendment 3 almost surely would have won but for the League’s abrupt switch late in the campaign. Having helped to put it on the ballot, Florida’s leading force for voting rights sacrificed its reputation for nonpartisanship and Florida’s 3.7 million independent voters under the influence of a partisan argument that the amendment would make it harder for Black candidates to be elected to the Legislature.

That has certainly not been the experience in California, the major state with a top-two open primary. There were 44 minority members in its Legislature in 2010, the year voters approved the open primary, according to data provided by the California State Library. By 2020, there were 61. In this year’s session, there will be 53. The number of Black lawmakers rose from 7 to 11 before declining to 9 this year, still an increase from 2010. Latino numbers went from 26 to 29 and those of Asian/Pacific Island heritage rose from 10 to 15.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who is both Black and South Asian, won a top-two primary to be re-elected as California attorney general and another to be elected to the U. S. Senate.

In Georgia, Democrat Rafael Warnock, who is Black, won what became a top-two primary for the seat of Sen. Johnny Isakson, who had resigned. He and Republican Kelly Loeffler, the governor’s appointee, were the top two vote-getters in the all-party general election, as provided by Georgia law, which went to a Jan. 5 runoff.

So please, let’s not hear any more nonsense that top-two is rigged against

Blacks or any other minority. It’s biased only against extremists. What could be better?

The top-two primary is the rare issue on which Republican and Democratic party pooh-bahs agree. They both oppose it. In Florida, they ganged up at the state Supreme Court in an unsuccessful attempt to bar it from the ballot. In California, the leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, volubly dislike it.

“Their bipartisan response should tell you everything you need to know. Political parties hate top-two, so voters should love it,” Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former Republican governor, and Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman, wrote in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed.

They said the 2010 reform made room for compromise in a legislative atmosphere that was so toxic, members seeking bipartisan agreement had to meet in secret.

Computer-assisted gerrymandering has contributed to worsening polarization in most states. The numbers are so stacked for one party or the other that their politicians need to worry only about winning the primaries, which tend to favor extreme candidates over moderates.

Top-two primaries overcome that, according to Schwarzenegger and Khanna.

“When candidates and voters know that more than one candidate from a given party can advance to the general election, an independent-minded Democrat or Republican can campaign to the voters in the middle of the political spectrum, not just to his or her party’s base, and still have a chance to advance along with a more conventional party-line candidate in the November election. Incumbents who know they have to worry about more than just their own party base wind up being more innovative and willing to strike legislative compromise,” they wrote.

A frequent criticism of the top-two system is that the candidates advancing to the general election may be from the same party. That happened in six of California’s Democratic congressional districts, including Pelosi’s, on Nov. 3.

But that objection misses the point. The voter registrations were so lopsided that the Republican candidates who did file in four of them had no realistic chance to win by any means. In Pelosi’s district, for example, Democrats outnumber Republicans 10-1, with unaffiliated voters accounting for nearly 27 percent of the total registration. But top-two at least gave the Republicans and independents in those districts an influence that traditional primaries would have denied them.

Alaska becomes the only state to combine an open primary like California’s with a general election instant runoff like Maine’s. Florida would benefit by that example.

Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Dan Sweeney, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.