Editorials: ‘Jungle primary’ brings unintended consequences | Harold Meyerson/Capital Times

Would the dysfunction of U.S. politics be dispelled if we got rid of partisan primaries? That’s the contention of Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. In an op-ed for The New York Times, Schumer argued that the primary system in most states, in which voters choose nominees for their respective parties who then run head to head in November, gives too much weight to the party faithful, who are inclined to select candidates who veer either far right or far left. The cure Schumer proposes for this ill is the “jungle primary,” in which all primary candidates, regardless of party, appear on the same ballot, with the top two finishers, again regardless of party, advancing to the general election. The senator cites the example of California — once the most gridlocked of states, now a place where legislation actually gets enacted — as proof that such primaries work. But Schumer misunderstands what got California working again. In so doing, he also misses the fatal flaws of the jungle primary.

Editorials: McDaniel needs to file a challenge or call it quits | Clarion-Ledger

Enough is enough. Chris McDaniel has used every excuse in the book to delay filing a challenge to incumbent Thad Cochran’s election as the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate. His campaign has said filing a challenge before having all evidence will prevent him from including additional evidence. They have said they need more time to gather more data. They have said they need birthdates to verify voter identities. They have said circuit clerks have prevented them from seeing public information. However, at the end of the day, McDaniel’s campaign has been given access to everything to which they are entitled under the law. And despite their assertions, introducing a challenge to the Mississippi Republican Party will in no way prevent them from presenting new information of voter fraud to a court if indeed they discover it after their challenge is filed.

Editorials: Montana’s absentee voting, signature-gathering laws discourage citizen initiatives | Charles S. Johnson/Ravalli Republic

Direct democracy, a proud tradition in Montana for more than a century, fell flat on its face this year. For the first time since 1992, no initiatives sponsored by citizens, groups or corporations qualified for the November ballot in Montana. Twelve of the 18 proposed ballot issues were cleared for signature-gathering, but none got enough signatures to appear on the November ballot, Secretary of State Linda McCulloch said. One factor is the growing trend of Montanans voting by absentee or mail-in ballots instead of showing up to the polls to cast their votes. In June, 68 percent of Montanans who voted in the primary did so by absentee ballot. As a result, initiative supporters no longer can count on that day to hit up large numbers of voters for signatures.

Editorials: Vote fraud myths meet voting rights reality | Clarence Page/Chicago Tribune

Before she was allowed to register and vote for the first time in Franklin County, N.C., Rosanell Eaton had to read the entire preamble to the U.S. Constitution out loud in front of three men in the county courthouse. Eaton is black. The three men testing her were white. The time was the early 1940s, when trying to vote was difficult and even dangerous for African-Americans. Contrived “literacy tests” were one of the milder obstacles that were deployed to suppress the black vote in the South. Now 93, Eaton is back in court. This summer she is lead plaintiff in one of two lawsuits brought by the North Carolina NAACP and others to prevent her state from raising a batch of new hurdles to voting in this November’s midterm elections. That lawsuit is one of two filed this month against a package of voter inconveniences signed into law by North Carolina’s Republican Gov. Pat McCrory. The new law includes cutbacks in early voting, new limits on voter registration, less poll workers’ assistance to voters and new voting requirements such as photo identification.

Editorials: Chris McDaniel should either show evidence or concede in Mississippi’s GOP primary | The Washington Post

It took just a few words for state Sen. Chris McDaniel to stoke tea party fervor after his runoff loss in the Mississippi Republican primary to incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran. “We’re not done fighting,” he said defiantly to the June 24 election-night crowd. A messy primary was about to get worse. Mr. McDaniel, who lost by about 7,600 votes, claimed that there were voting “irregularities,” insisting that those who voted in the June 3 Democratic primary illegally cast ballots three weeks later in the Republican runoff. He also argued that many voters broke an obscure and unenforceable Mississippi law that prohibits citizens from participating in a primary unless they intend to back the party’s nominee in the general election. Because Mississippi does not register voters by party, Mr. Cochran had focused on getting more left-leaning, African American voters to the polls for the runoff.

Editorials: Indonesia’s democracy: A new kind of president | The Economist

The wait is over. After taking two weeks to count 135m ballots from 480,000-odd polling stations across the vast archipelago, Indonesia’s Election Commission (the KPU) has at last confirmed that Joko Widodo has been elected president. The commission said that Mr Joko, the governor of Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, and his vice-presidential running mate, Jusuf Kalla, won 71m votes at the election on July 9th. That represents 53.2% of the valid votes. The losers, Prabowo Subianto and Hatta Rajasa, won 62.6m votes, or 46.9%. Mr Joko was victorious in 23 of the country’s 33 provinces. His winning margin of 8.4m votes, or 6.3 percentage points, was even wider than had been predicted by most of the respected pollsters on the night of the election.

Editorials: Early-voting cuts in Ohio rightfully draw Justice Department ire: editorial | Cleveland Plain Dealer

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has signaled that the Justice Department will back pending Ohio litigation aimed at providing more early voting days for Ohioans and restoring Ohio’s voting “golden week.” Holder and his department are more than justified in doing so. At stake is one of the most precious of constitutional rights, the right to vote. That is a fundamental right Americans have died for, as, for example, three patriots – two white, one black – did 50 years ago in Neshoba County, Mississippi. In February, Ohio General Assembly Republicans passed, and Gov. John Kasich signed, Senate Bill 238. The bill, passed along party lines (Republicans for, Democrats against), abolished Ohio’s so-called golden week. This was the week right before Ohio’s voter registration deadline when an Ohioan simultaneously could register to vote, apply for and then cast an in-person, early-voting ballot at his or her county board of elections.

Editorials: Living Dangerously in Indonesia | Wall Street Journal

Instead of representing a triumph of democracy, Indonesia’s presidential election threatens to spark a crisis. On Tuesday afternoon officials were poised to announce that Jakarta Governor Joko Widodo won the July 9 election with 53% of the vote. But losing candidate and self-styled strongman Prabowo Subianto denounced the result, leveled charges of widespread fraud and withdrew from the race. “We are rejecting this presidential election, which is legally flawed,” Mr. Subianto said from his campaign headquarters, insisting that the vote was “riddled with problems” and “undemocratic.” As confusion spread, his brother and campaign advisor Hashim Djojohadikusumo clarified that “Prabowo Subianto is no longer a presidential candidate.” Though he has complained of irregularities since the vote, Mr. Subianto has marshaled little evidence that the result is illegitimate. Indonesia has some unusual voting practices across its 900 inhabited islands and 190 million eligible voters, but observers and officials generally judged the balloting peaceful, free and fair.

Editorials: Adopt the Open Primary | Sen. Charles Schumer/New York Times

Polarization and partisanship are a plague on American politics. Political scientists have found that the two parties have each grown more ideologically homogeneous since the 1970s. The Senate hasn’t been so polarized since Reconstruction; the House has not been so divided since around 1900. As measured by laws passed, the current Congress is on track to be among the least productive in our republic’s history. How did this happen? One of the main causes has not gotten enough attention: the party primary system. … We need a national movement to adopt the “top-two” primary (also known as an open primary), in which all voters, regardless of party registration, can vote and the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, then enter a runoff. This would prevent a hard-right or hard-left candidate from gaining office with the support of just a sliver of the voters of the vastly diminished primary electorate; to finish in the top two, candidates from either party would have to reach out to the broad middle.

Editorials: What’s wrong with Palmdale: an unfair election system | Los Angeles Times

In the year since the city of Palmdale’s at-large election system was found by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge to have violated the California Voting Rights Act, city officials have responded aggressively. Instead of fighting so hard to keep the status quo, Palmdale should turn its attention to fixing a broken electoral system. In the fall, after Judge Mark V. Mooney ordered the city to cancel its Nov. 5 at-large election, Palmdale officials persuaded California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal to allow the election to proceed. Then, in the winter, Mooney banned the certification of the election results and ordered a new election by district rather than at large; Palmdale again appealed, arguing that as a charter city, it was not governed by the state Voting Rights Act.

Editorials: California recounts are rare, and should be fair | Jessica A. Levinson/The Sacramento Bee

Until former Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez called it off Friday, we were in the midst of what was likely to become the biggest election recount in California history. If anything good comes of this political tempest, it is to remind us how badly we need to reform our recount laws. The race to be the next state controller was excruciatingly tight. Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin, a Republican, is now set to face off against Board of Equalization member Betty Yee. Four hundred eighty-one votes separated Pérez and Yee, both Democrats. After the recount, which cost approximately $30,000, Perez picked up 10 votes. The way we do recounts in California is, well, a tad unruly. Welcome to the Golden State, where a candidate or other registered voter must request and pay for a recount. And they can choose which precincts will be subject to the recount. Why is this a problem?

Editorials: Fixing Florida’s redistricting | Tom Tryon/Herald Tribune

Terry Lewis — the circuit judge, not the former interim manager of Sarasota city and county governments — faces a dilemma. Lewis recently ruled from Tallahassee that the state Legislature violated terms of a “fair districts” amendment to Florida’s constitution. Among other provisions, the amendment — approved in 2010 by 63 percent of voters statewide — requires the Legislature to create reasonably shaped congressional districts without favoring incumbents or political parties. Following a 12-day trial, Lewis found that interference by Republican operatives both manipulated and influenced the creation of new districts statewide. Legislative leaders declined to appeal. During a hearing Thursday, Lewis must either:

A. Allow this year’s congressional elections to continue in Florida, even though he found that the creation of two of the districts was unconstitutional.

B. Require the Legislature to redraw the Fifth and Tenth districts.

Editorials: The clear sin of contracting North Carolina’s voter participation | Gene Nichol/NewsObserver.com

North Carolina’s new voter ID law, currently being litigated in federal court in Winston-Salem, is an election lawyer’s dream. Ending same-day registration, cutting early voting from 17 days to 10, eliminating a popular high school civics program encouraging students to register before they turn 18, expanding poll “observers” and instituting the country’s toughest photo ID requirement, the statute is a cornucopia of voter restriction. Small wonder we’ve been sued by the federal government. Winston Churchill once rejected a dessert by saying: “Take away that pudding; it has no theme.” The same cannot be said of our voter ID bill. It changes election law in dozens of disparate and intersecting ways. The principal features have only this in common: Each makes it harder to vote than it was before. Such is life, here, at the leading edge of American voter suppression. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that one of the potent challenges to the statute hasn’t been seen in our voting rights jurisprudence before. Seven college students from across the state argue that the oddly constructed identification measure violates the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. You remember it, the provision that reduced the voting age from 21 to 18 and says, interestingly, that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged … on account of age.”

Editorials: The F.E.C. Lags on Campaign Finance Disclosures | New York Times

Billions of dollars are being spent in the run-up to this November’s midterm elections. The Supreme Court has struck down limits on campaign spending by corporations and unions, as well as overall caps on individual donations to candidates for federal office. More and more money is also being spent through ostensibly independent “super PACs” and nonprofit entities. Even as cash gushes through the system, though, we still have a key underpinning of our campaign finance law: the principle that the public has a right to know who finances campaigns, and how candidates, parties and other political committees are using those funds. If the Federal Election Commission, the agency charged with receiving and reviewing the reports and making the information available, falls down on the job, this principle is undermined. On May 21, about a month after reports for the first quarter of this year were filed, the research and technology teams here at the Center for Responsive Politics did a routine download of F.E.C. data, as we’ve done hundreds of times in our 30-year history. We use the information to populate a database that allows anyone to track giving by individual donors, their employers and their economic interests and to examine the links among campaign money, lobbying activity and the personal finances of politicians and key officials.

Editorials: Florida Déjà Voodoo – Why there is no reform that could be better for progressives than redistricting reform | Ron Klain/Slate

In my legal career, I’ve suffered two painful defeats litigating against the Republican political machine of Florida. The first was a case called Bush v. Gore. The second—less famous, but just as bitter—came two years later, in 2002, when I worked on a legal challenge to Florida’s absurdly partisan redistricting plan, only to see our claims rejected by both the state and federal courts. So last week’s court ruling overturning gerrymandered congressional districts in Florida gave me a serious case of déjà vu for several reasons. First, its author was Leon County Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis—a major figure in the post-2000 Florida election litigation miasma, who ultimately wound up overseeing the statewide hand recount of ballots that the U.S. Supreme Court halted in its infamous 5–4 order. Second, the ruling represented a long overdue vindication of our 2002 claim that the Florida Legislature had abused its power in entrenching its control over the state through redistricting. While much of the coverage of Lewis’ opinion has focused on the Florida legislative “chicanery” that it laid bare, a more substantial question is this: Why did this case strike down a hyper-partisan districting plan, when virtually every other such court challenge, in virtually every other state, has failed over the past three decades? How was the widespread bastardization that allows “representatives to pick their voters, instead of voters picking their representatives” finally checked by a court decision?

Editorials: North Carolina Will Determine the Future of the Voting Rights Act | Ari Berman/The Nation

In 1940, 19-year-old Rosanell Eaton took a two-hour mule ride to the Franklin County courthouse in eastern North Carolina to register to vote. The three white male registrars told her to stand up straight, with her arms at her side, look straight ahead and recite the preamble to the Constitution word-for-word from memory. Eaton did so, becoming one of the few blacks to pass a literacy test and make it on the voting rolls in the Jim Crow era. Eaton, a granddaughter of a slave, is one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights movement. She’s devoted her life to expanding the franchise, personally registering 4,000–5,000 new voters before losing count. “My forefathers didn’t have the opportunity to register or vote,” she said. “It is my intention to help people reach that point when they could do something.” Now, as a result of North Carolina’s new voting restrictions—widely regarded as the most onerous in the country—the 93-year-old activist could be disenfranchised by the state’s voter ID requirement because the name on her driver’s license does not match the name on her voter registration card.

Editorials: Voter ID lawsuits are the last chance to prove the laws are intentionally racist | Ana Marie Cox/The Guardian

This week, the US Department of Justice and the state of Texas started arguments in the first of what will be a summer-long dance between the two authorities over voting rights. There are three suits being tried in two districts over gerrymandering and Texas’s voter identification law – both of which are said to be racially motivated. In its filing, the DoJ describes the law as “exceed[ing] the requirements imposed by any other state” at the time that it passed. If the DoJ can prove the arguments in its filing, it won’t just defeat an unjust law: it could put the fiction of “voter fraud” to rest once and for all. These battles, plus parallel cases proceeding in North Carolina, hinge on proving that the states acted with explicitly exclusionary intent toward minority voters – a higher standard was necessary prior to the Supreme Court’s gutting of Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) back in January. Under Section 3, the DoJ had wide latitude to look at possible consequences of voting regulation before they were even passed – the “preclearance” provision. Ironically, because the states held to preclearance had histories of racial discrimination, some of the messier aspects of the laws’ current intentions escaped comment.

Editorials: Should Massachusetts bother with ballot questions? | The Boston Globe

The Senate president spoke: “So, what you want me to do, James, is manipulate procedures to ensure that there is no vote to repeal your law for one full year. Is that correct? I wouldn’t put it that way, but yes,” I said. “Done!” Bill Bulger declared. And with that, Massachusetts became the first state to require certain banks, insurance companies, and publicly traded corporations to disclose what they paid in state taxes. All because tens of thousands of signatures demanding a ballot question convinced business leaders and politicians like Governor Bill Weld that a compromise was better than what might be handed to them in the election six weeks later, when voters weighed in on the measure. Bulger agreed to back the narrower version of the proposal which still required the disclosure of corporate tax payments. But could a law that horrified corporate leaders — whose money moved Beacon Hill — really survive? That was 1992, when I lobbied on Beacon Hill as director of the Tax Equity Alliance for Massachusetts. Legislating by ballot had been made possible three-quarters of a century earlier, when the state constitution was amended to allow voters to make or repeal laws.

Editorials: Government’s voting source code secrecy is dumb and dangerous | ZDNet

Here’s an idea for streamlining our national elections. Once people have voted, how about we scoop up all the ballot papers, put them into a big sack, and hand it to a group of masked strangers? They take the sack away somewhere — somewhere secret, so no-one can interfere with them — and some time later they return and just tell us who won. I reckon it’d be cheaper and a lot less trouble for everyone than all this slow, manual counting in front of scrutineers, right? No? Don’t like it? Well, boys and girls, given that the Australian government is refusing to show us the source code for the Australian Electoral Commissions’s EasyCount software, that’s pretty much exactly how your votes for the Senate are being counted right now. Your Senate votes, the ones where you’ve carefully specified your preferences for dozens of candidates, go into the black box of EasyCount, magic happens, and out pops the result.

Editorials: Kansas voting ‘cure is worse’ | Wichita Eagle

In signing off Friday on Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s galling plan to let some Kansans vote in some races and not others on Aug. 5, a judge concluded that “the cure is worse than the disease.” That’s an apt description of the law that Kobach sold as a remedy for voter fraud but that has created a barrier to voting for 19,500 Kansans. The American Civil Liberties Union wanted to block Kobach from treating voters’ ballots differently depending on whether they registered using the state or federal form. Shawnee County District Judge Franklin Theis probably chose the least confusing option of letting Kobach’s nutty two-tiered plan proceed while the larger legal battle plays out in federal court. As he said, if he forced election officials to count all votes from both kinds of registrants and Kobach later prevailed in court, it would be “a mess” at that point to try to identify and discount the unlawful votes.

Editorials: Texas GOP’s secret anti-Hispanic plot: Smoking gun emails revealed | Salon.com

On Nov. 17, 2010, Eric Opiela sent an email to Gerard Interiano. A Texas Republican Party associate general counsel, Opiela served at that time as a campaign adviser to the state’s speaker of the House Joe Straus, R-San Antonio; he was about to become the man who state lawmakers understood spoke “on behalf of the Republican Congressmen from Texas,” according to minority voting-rights plaintiffs, who have sued Texas for discriminating against them. A few weeks before receiving Opiela’s email, Interiano had started as counsel to Straus’ office. He was preparing to assume top responsibility for redrawing the state’s political maps; he would become the “one person” on whom the state’s redistricting “credibility rests,” according to Texas’ brief in voting-rights litigation.

Editorials: After Afghanistan’s questionable election, a real chance for peace | The Washington Post

A week ago the political system fostered by the United States in Afghanistan was on the brink of collapse, with a new civil war being the likely result. After Afghan election authorities announced the preliminary results of a presidential election runoff, the apparent loser, Abdullah Abdullah, readied what looked to some like a coup, dispatching forces to Kabul police stations and lining up provincial governors to endorse his announcement of a government. Timely phone calls to Mr. Abdullah and rival Ashraf Ghani, first by Secretary of State John F. Kerry and then by President Obama, temporarily defused the crisis. Now Mr. Kerry has brokered an accord that appears to establish a clear plan for arbitrating the dispute over the election and establishing a stable government — a turnaround so remarkable that the U.N. representative in Kabul is calling it “not just a top-notch diplomatic achievement [but] close to a miracle.”

Editorials: Voting in China, a Distant Dream | Yu Hua/New York Times

I am 54, but have never in my life seen an election ballot. “Have you seen one?” I ask people, out of curiosity. Like me, most of them have no idea what a ballot looks like and have only seen pictures on television of people completely unknown to them clutching a ballot and voting on their behalf. A few say they have seen a ballot, but a long time ago, in their college days, when a class monitor came over, ballot in hand, and had them write down a name they’d never heard of. That was the closest they came to a democratic election. Every March, however, almost 3,000 National People’s Congress delegates and more than 2,000 Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference delegates gather in Beijing. The government claims that, as participants in the political process, they represent the voices of China’s 1.35 billion people. Every five years sees a turnover in the two assemblies, and at the meetings in March 2013, delegates who had completed their terms made way for new members. A friend of mine, returning to Beijing after a lecture tour in Europe, got a phone call as soon as he landed: He had been elected a member of the C.P.P.C.C., he was told, and was to proceed at once to the meeting hall.

Editorials: Scytl e-voting exposes the dangers of automating a democracy | Scott M. Fulton/Fierce Enterprise Communications

Technology is already neutral. While vendors and manufacturers and lobbyists characterize technology as a natural force unto itself with the power to improve our lives and work simply through direct contact with it, more often than not, it provides people within organizations, societies, states and countries with the tools they require to further entrench themselves in bureaucracy, and to bury themselves further in the obscurity and anonymity they desire. The first trials of Scytl’s protocol took place in Norway in 2013. The Carter Center, which has monitored and verified the accuracy of global elections ever since Pres. Carter left the White House, reported on the progress of the Scytl approach (.pdf). The process of voting in Norway, according to that report, was not at all dissimilar to the way B-52 bombers were told to attack Moscow in the movie Dr. Strangelove:

In order to vote, a voter had to register their mobile phone with a centralized government register (one could do so online while the voting was underway). The voter should have also received a special card… delivered through the postal service, with personalized numeric return codes. These cards provided the voter a list of four-digit numbers corresponding to each party running for election. The four-digit numbers were randomly assigned for every voter so that, for example, any two voters who wanted to cast their vote for Labour would unlikely have the same return codes associated to the Labour party.

Editorials: 7 papers, 4 government inquiries, 2 news investigations and 1 court ruling proving voter fraud is mostly a myth | Christopher Ingraham/The Washington Post

Voter ID laws are back in the news this week after a group of college students joined a lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s new restrictive rules. And as Catherine Rampell pointed out earlier this week, it’s not just ID laws – Republican state legislatures have been busy devising all manner of creative ways to make voting more difficult for traditionally Democratic-leaning groups. All of these restrictive measures take their justification from a perceived need to prevent “voter fraud.” But there is overwhelming scholarly and legal consensus that voter fraud is vanishingly rare, and in fact non-existent at the levels imagined by voter ID proponents. That hasn’t stopped many Republican lawmakers from crying “fraud” every time they’re faced with an unfavorable election outcome (see also: McDaniel, Chris).

Editorials: Millennials get cut off at the polls | Catherine Rampell/Washington Post

First they came for blacks, and we said nothing. Then they came for Latinos, poor people and married women, and we again ignored the warning signs. Now, after our years of apathy, they’re coming for us: the nation’s millennials. Across the country, Republican state policymakers have hoisted barriers to voting by passing voter-ID laws and curtailing electoral accommodations such as same-day registration and early voting. These policy changes are allegedly intended to eradicate the imagined scourge of voter fraud, but the real point seems to be voter suppression. For a time, the targeted populations were primarily racial, ethnic and income groups that traditionally vote Democratic. Now they happen to include Gen-Y’ers, more specifically my college-age brethren. We millennials may be fickle in our loyalties, generally distrustful of government institutions and unaligned with any political party, but our generation’s motley, liberal-to-libertarian-leaning ideological preferences still threaten red-state leadership.

Editorials: Do voting restrictions prevent fraud or cause disenfranchisement? | Al Jazeera

Lawyers from the Justice Department and a variety of civic groups appeared at an Asheville, North Carolina, federal courthouse this week, seeking an injunction that would delay portions of a state voting law from going into effect before the midterm elections this November. At issue are a reduction in days for early voting, the elimination of same-day voter registration and a prohibition on counting provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct. (The most controversial provision, a photo ID requirement, does not go into effect until 2016.) Now a judge will decide if those elements should be delayed or implemented at all.

Editorials: Virginia Voter ID law sets stage for confusion | Courtney Mills/Roanoke Times

For the third time in recent years, Virginia voters will face new voter ID requirements when they go to the polls this November. Virginia’s new photo ID law, which went in to effect on July 1, was a long time coming. The law, sponsored by Senator Mark Obenshain, was passed in the 2013 legislative session but is only now being fully implemented. Despite over a year of time to plan, one of the largest questions still has to be answered: what IDs will actually serve as voter ID? At a State Board of Elections (SBE) hearing on June 10, board members heard testimony from community groups, voters, and county registrars (the people tasked with enforcing this ID standard at the polls).

Editorials: How Can We Fix the Broken Primary Election System? | Seth Masket/Pacific Standard

We’ve all heard plenty of complaints in recent years that national and state legislatures have simply grown too polarized to govern effectively. Democrats and Republicans not only can’t work together, they see each other as enemies and threats to the country. Thanks to this polarization, the country can’t solve the problems it faces. The Bipartisan Policy Center has produced a comprehensive document aimed at addressing this issue. (Disclosure: I served as a consultant on this project during an event last year.) To its credit, the Center isn’t pushing any magic bullets. There is no one simple reform that will substantially reduce polarization while allowing the United States to remain a democracy. It is, however, pushing a series of reforms that, enacted together, could potentially have some kind of impact. Given how many of us decline to even join parties in the first place, should we be encouraging, no less mandating, that such people vote in party nomination contests?

Editorials: What do you call 7 lbs. of campaign mail for 3 voters? | Dary Sragow/Los Angeles Times

We’re conscientious voters in my household, never missing a chance to cast a ballot. And that’s probably why, in the final weeks before elections, we find our mailbox flooded with a tsunami of political advertisements. In the recent primary, for example, nearly 200 pieces of mail showed up for my wife, my daughter and me, with 29 of them arriving on the Monday before the election, long after we had made up our minds and voted by mail. As a voter, I was annoyed by the 7 pounds of mail we received. We got 19 mailers in the race to replace County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, 16 of them from a single candidate. In the race for the state Senate seat that Ted Lieu vacated to run for Congress, 70 pieces of mail came. Fifty-five mailers came from those hoping to replace retiring Congressman Henry A. Waxman, 43 of them on behalf of candidates who didn’t make it into the runoff. And there were 25 so-called slate mailers laying out a list of candidates we should vote for, most of whom (if you read the fine print) had paid to be included on the slate.