Sightline Institute Research

• A Two-Word Fix for Alaska’s Ballot Confusion

  In 2024 Alaska Democrats were understandably incensed when Eric Hafner, a convict who had never lived in their state, ran for Alaska's US House seat as a Democrat. State and federal law allowed Hafner to seek the office, and state law let him register with the party he preferred. The state Democratic Party, for its part, could do nothing. It had no way to disavow him or indicate on the ballot its endorsement of incumbent Representative Mary Peltola. Come election day, Hafner got more than 3,500 first-choice votes from Alaskans who saw his name and party on the ballot but presumably had no idea that if elected, he would represent them from a New York prison where he was serving 20 years. Two years earlier, the state Republican Party was the one fuming. Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III, registered Republicans, both on the top-four general election ballot, were feuding on the campaign trail, refusing to cross-endorse each other as co-partisans typically do in ranked choice elections. The state GOP endorsed Begich early and never endorsed Palin. In the general election, Palin and Begich split Republican votes, as expected, pushing the election to Mary Peltola, who became the first Democrat in the seat in 49 years. (Two years later, with Palin out of the picture and New York prisoner Hafner siphoning off Democratic votes from Peltola, Begich reclaimed the post for the GOP.) Now both Republicans and Democrats in Alaska have a beef with a minor flaw in their state's ballot rules that lets candidates claim a party but doesn't let parties claim candidates. The same flaw fusses California and Washington, the two other states that use unified all-candidate primaries. In short, any candidate in these three states can claim any party, potentially confusing voters as to who really represents their values. And political parties can do nothing to stop them. The fix to this problem in all three states is easy: let parties indicate their endorsement of a candidate with two words: "[Democratic or Republican] Nominee." North Americans hate political parties (often including their own), and anti-party sentiment has been prevalent since the Progressive movement more than a hundred years ago. But political scientists concur that for all their disrepute, political parties are the essential intermediaries of democracies everywhere. They aggregate like-minded voters, assemble coalitions that can win, mediate disputes among coalition factions, articulate visions and platforms, and serve as shorthand identifiers on the ballot for time-strapped voters. Indeed, party identification is so valuable that in its absence, many voters lean on unreliable markers such as gender or surname to try to guess which right candidate is right for them. Giving parties space to claim their nominees on ballots in Alaska, California, or Washington would not change the states' election system in fundamental ways, but it would provide voters with more reliable information. Research by political scientist Cheryl Boudreau and her colleagues at the University of California, Davis, shows that informing voters of candidates' party endorsements helps them correctly identify candidates whom they agree with. In an experiment with voters in a nonpartisan mayoral election in which political parties had made endorsements, informing voters of candidates' party endorsements let voters find their best-matched candidate 59 percent of the time, compared to 53 percent of the time when they don't know the parties' endorsements. And that improvement came not with putting the party labels on the ballot but with a mailing sent to voters. A six-point gain in voters' alignment is modest, but in close races it could be decisive. Alaska already sends more information to voters than most states do. The state's Division of Elections prints and mails official voters' guides to all. These guides feature candidates' statements and often include the endorsements they have won from party organizations and w...

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• No More 48-Candidate Races

  A surplus of candidates can ruin any political campaign, and it's happened twice in recent groundbreaking elections in Cascadia. Fortunately, neighboring jurisdictions have demonstrated the solution to this problem: raise filing fees. Alaska and Portland each recently debuted a new, much-anticipated ranked choice voting method. In both places, the trouble was that putting your name on the ballot was so easy (costing less than a tank of gas for a Ford F-150) that the elections were flooded with candidates. The result, in both Alaska and Portland, was an inaugural campaign that tried voters' patience with teeming lists of candidates, many of them narcissistic dreamers with no intention of campaigning, no support from key constituencies, and no chance of winning. One fix to this surplus is simple: charge candidates a filing fee large enough to dissuade dilettantes without deterring contenders. Montana, Alaska's closest cousin among the states, and Portland's urban counterparts in neighboring Washington charge filing fees more than ten times as high. That's why these Cascadian jurisdictions do not attract candidates like fishing derbies draw anglers. Alaska's 2022 inaugural election was run under its top-four law. In top-four, voters choose four finalists in a primary election and then pick among them in a ranked choice voting general election. Voters for an open US House seat confronted a ballot overloaded with 48 candidates (pictured on the website). The state's new election plan was supposed to make things better; instead, voters got a ballot as daunting as The Cheesecake Factory's menu. This race was a special election for the state's sole US House seat, unexpectedly vacated by the death of Rep. Don Young after 49 years in office. The absence of an incumbent and the novelty of the new rules recruited a bumper crop of candidates, and the nominal filing fee of just $100 did nothing to separate the chaff from the grain. For one Benjamin Franklin, you could get your name on every ballot and in every voters' guide in the state and - who knows? - maybe your candidacy would catch fire. However, most did not catch even a spark, and few candidates raised money or ran actual campaigns. Just one-fifth of candidates cracked 2 percent of the vote. At the bottom of the pack, some 19 candidates won fewer than 100 votes each. The same pattern emerged in Portland. The city 's 2024 election was the inaugural run of its new election system, which uses a single round of ranked choice voting for all races. Some 118 candidates surged into municipal contests. City Council Districts 3 and 4 each had 30 candidates for their three seats. (See sample ballots in the online version of this article.) Such races make voting a morass and campaigning a Black Friday crowd scene. At some debates, each candidate got speaking time measured in seconds. In the end, as in Alaska, voters ignored most candidates. In District 4, for example, only 11 voters picked L Christopher Regis. He had enough support to field a kickball team in one of Portland's adult co-ed leagues but fell 11,251 votes short of winning a council seat. Regis was not alone. In Districts 3 and 4 combined, only a quarter of candidates crossed the 2 percent threshold. Most of the also-rans did not actually run. They just made the process of voting feel like scrolling through the dross on Netflix. The sudden opening of every elected office in the city, all at the same time, brought the crush of candidates. Empty chairs attract aspirants. What's more, excitement about the new system itself drew participation, making more candidates believe they could compete. But the fact that securing a spot on the ballot cost nothing but $75 for council or $100 for mayor amplified the gold rush spirit. Low filing fees for open seats elsewhere have also attracted swollen fields of candidates. In 2003, for example, a special election recalled the sitting governor of California, Gray Davis, and voters' plurality winne...

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• Will an Electoral Glitch Send a Republican to Patty Murray’s Seat in 2028?

  When six-term US Senator Patty Murray is up for reelection in 2028, the Washington state leader will be 78 years old. If she does not retire on her own, she may well find herself challenged by younger Democrats, as is now happening to 79-year-old Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. Gerontocracy is out of vogue among Democrats; many blame their party's loss of the presidency on 81-year-old Joe Biden's delay in stepping aside. If Murray forgoes the race, expect a stampede of eager Democrats hoping to succeed her. Her seat has not been vacant since 1992, so every ambitious politician in the Evergreen State will be eyeing it. Indeed, during her 2022 run for reelection, when no other big-name Democrats entered the race, Murray still drew 17 primary challengers. In Alaska that same year, when a US House seat opened for the first time in decades upon the death of Rep. Don Young, who held the office for 49 years, some 48 candidates threw their hats into the ring. Imagine how many will file if (and when) Murray steps aside. The line of Democratic contenders could resemble the throngs of hikers on the trail to Camp Muir on a summer weekend. In other words, it will practically be a mob scene. Unlike in Alaska's pioneering election system, though, platoons of candidates can be a problem in Washington - a big problem. That's because Washington's unusual top-two elections are haunted by a mathematical anomaly that could hand Murray's seat to a Republican, even in deep-blue Washington. Fortunately there are fixes, and one of them is about to debut in Seattle: unaltered top-two in general elections combined with a targeted occasional use of ranked choice voting in certain overcrowded primary elections. (For brevity, we'll call it "ranked top-two.") If the state legislature adopts this Seattle plan in 2026, it could be up and running statewide in time for the August 2028 US Senate primary. To understand ranked top-two, you need to understand the anomaly, in which top-two misfires and elects a less-popular candidate over a more-popular one. The easiest way to understand it is through the 2024 election of Dave Upthegrove, a veteran Democrat, to the state's public lands commissioner post. In that race, Upthegrove came within a hair's breadth of losing the primary, in which two Republicans and five Democrats faced off. The five Democrats gained 57 percent of the 1.9 million votes cast, but they divided their share many ways. During most of the vote-counting process, the two Republicans led, with 22 percent for Jaime Herrera Beutler and 21 percent for Sue Kuehl Pederson. Only when the final batch of ballots was tallied, days after the election, did Upthegrove's count exceed Pederson's - and by only 49 votes. Had he fallen short, the general election would have been between Republicans Beutler and Pederson, and one of them would be holding the office now. Instead, after clearing the primary, Upthegrove quickly consolidated Democrats' support and won the general with a five-point margin. A similar scenario unfolded in 2016, when three Democrats split the field for state treasurer, two Republicans advanced to the general election, and the state elected one of them, Duane Davidson. What's more, Davidson, who ended up being a one-term office holder, was the only Republican in that seat in six decades. The same thing could happen in an open US Senate race in 2028: a huge field of Democrats could hand the race to two Republicans. The Upthegrove anomaly in top-two is specific and mathematical. It's not just that both finalists are from the same party. That's normal in districts that lean red or blue. For instance, of the nine races for open congressional seats in Washington since the advent of top-two in 2008, three of them have paired two members of the same party. Most recently, in 2020, Marilyn Strickland and Beth Doglio, both Democrats, competed for the US House seat in District 10. Indeed, such same-party runoffs are a feature of top-two, not a bug...

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• Yukoners to Weigh in on Ranked Voting

  If you had a chance to overhaul your government, where would you begin? Last year, 38 Yukoners from every corner of the territory stepped up to answer that question in a citizens' assembly on electoral reform. Their recommendation? Upgrade the Yukon Legislative Assembly's first-past-the-post elections to ranked voting, much like Alaskans did in 2020. Voting is already underway for a statewide plebiscite on the assembly's reform of choice. Though the vote is advisory, two of the Yukon's three major parties have committed to respecting the will of the voters if they win control of the assembly this year. So, will the reform that let Alaskans vote their values and produced a more politically diverse and functional legislature inspire a similar change in the Yukon? Residents will know more after polls close at 8:00 p.m. on November 3. In general elections, rather than filling in a single ballot bubble for a candidate for member of the legislative assembly (MLA) in their district, voters could rank party nominees in order of preference, starting with their first choice for MLA, then second, and so on. If no candidate were to win a majority in the first round of tallying, officials would eliminate the lowest-performing candidate, redistributing their votes to voters' second choices. The process would continue until a candidate won a majority, or as close to a majority as possible. (Elections Yukon has an overview on their website.) In general elections, rather than filling in a single ballot bubble for a candidate for member of the legislative assembly (MLA) in their district, voters could rank party nominees in order of preference, starting with their first choice for MLA, then second, and so on.2 If no candidate were to win a majority in the first round of tallying, officials would eliminate the lowest-performing candidate, redistributing their votes to voters' second choices. The process would continue until a candidate won a majority, or as close to a majority as possible. Elections Yukon has published an overview here. In Alaska, the ranked voting upgrade has prevented "spoiled" elections, given voters more viable choices, encouraged candidates to work toward common goals, and created a cross-partisan, solutions-focused legislature. Though the Yukon's governmental structure and political makeup differ from Alaska, similar dynamics and incentives would likely carry over. In general elections, the Yukon's single-member electoral districts are prone to the same plurality winner problem that prompted Alaskans to adopt ranked voting in the first place. When there are more than two candidates in the running, as has been the case in 94 percent of general election assembly contests since 2000, voting blocs may fracture. If like-minded voters split their vote between two similar candidates, a conservative district can send a liberal MLA to office (or vice versa) with only plurality support - more votes than anyone else, but not reflective of majority preference. As such, voters may feel compelled to vote strategically, rather than for their favorite candidate, to avoid splitting the vote. At its most extreme, vote-splitting can deliver one party a number of seats that is vastly out of line with what the voters wanted. Take for example the 2001 British Columbia general election. BC Liberals won 97 percent of seats in the provincial assembly with only 58 percent of the popular vote, all because the NDP and Green Party divvied up a similar voter base. Could the same thing happen in the Yukon? To some degree, it already does; just not to the benefit of any one party. For the last three elections, MLAs who got less than 50 percent of the vote in their district won well over half of assembly seats: 12 members in the 2021 election, 17 members in 2016, and 16 in 2011. In other words, it's possible for every riding to go the way of Kluane, where MLA Wade Istchenko has won three consecutive elections even though most voters preferred other can...

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• To Build Fast, Think Small

  Speed matters. And to people looking for a home today, it matters a great deal whether that home is built next year, or in ten. If Cascadia's leaders really believed in speed, then they would focus more on re-legalizing small, neighborhood-size buildings with 6 to 12 homes each. But despite recent reforms, small apartment buildings remain illegal almost everywhere in Cascadian cities and across North America. Meanwhile, advocates and leaders in the region have legalized medium-sized and large apartment buildings via transit-oriented development, which smartly co-locates new apartment homes alongside transit infrastructure. California now allows up to 9 stories next to major transit stops, Washington up to 6, and British Columbia up to 20. This is praiseworthy progress, but it's limited to larger buildings that will take many years to plan and build. An example from our pro-housing forbearers illustrates just how long we might wait for larger projects to materialize: in 2014, 31-year-old Graham Jones spoke hopefully to Vancouver City Council and then-Mayor Gregor Robertson, pleading for more homes at the old Oakridge Mall site. Jones asked council to, quote "please consider that this project will be phased in over the next 10-15 years. It will represent current city residents, but also many who are not represented today," endquote. That was 11 years ago; Robertson is now the federal housing minister; and no one has yet moved into the Oakridge development. The fastest way - the only fast way - to build a lot of homes is simple: re-legalize small apartment buildings, generally no taller than a mature tree, in all neighborhoods, just like they used to be. All other solutions ask today's beleaguered 31-year-olds to wait many years to see results. For politicians working within four-year electoral windows, moving fast means thinking small. It's the only way to deliver the new homes their constituents need within a single term of office. Small apartment buildings have been all but illegal to build here in Vancouver for nearly a century. City leaders began implementing zoning restrictions in the 1920s "largely to prevent the intrusion of apartment houses in single- or two-family areas," wrote Harland Bartholomew, who drew Vancouver's first zoning map. In the US, the Supreme Court justified zoning regulations in 1926, writing: "the apartment house is a mere parasite." As a result, much of Vancouver's planning energy has gone into transit-oriented towers, often on old industrial sites, limiting new homes to fewer centralized nodes. This political compromise has been in place locally for decades, known as The Grand Bargain: exclusively zoned land remains so, while towers on busy streets accommodate some growth, aka "high-rise density, low-scale suburbia, little in between." The Grand Bargain promises new homes. Just not built quickly, or in the nicest places, or at the lowest cost. It's an attempted sleight of hand by civic leaders: they promise greater access to nice homes in desirable neighborhoods, but they deliver large apartment buildings, slowly, on just 10 percent of the city's land. Large apartment buildings on busy streets are wonderful; this article was written in one. But zoning that proscribes the housing types between towers and single-detached homes leaves much of the land in our cities off-limits - and many residents or would-be residents without affordable options to call home. The redevelopment of False Creek's north shore by Concord Pacific is Vancouver's largest and most significant example of Grand Bargain planning. It was a visionary project that reshaped the city for the better and gave Vancouver its iconic skyline. But this project also underlines how long even successful megaprojects can take to deliver the full measure of homes they promise. At the site's eastern end, fully 40 years after it broke ground, 380,000 square feet of prime, waterfront land still sit barren and undeveloped. A similar story has played...

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