Guest Commentary written by

Alan Zundel)

Alan Zundel is a retired political science professor and a founding member of the Equal Vote Coalition.

Re: “Democratic angst and gerrymandering threaten California’s political reforms,” 

Dan Walters writes in his commentary that vote-splitting by Democratic voters in the governor’s race and the redistricting wars that California and Texas have engaged in threaten California’s top-two primary and independent redistricting reforms.

Change is fine with me, especially changing the top-two primary. But returning to a closed primary system is a step backward, not forward. 

If we return to partisan primaries, an open primary system would be better than a closed primary system. In an open primary each voter can choose which party’s primary they want to vote in. That way independents are not shut out of the primaries.

Even better, stick with top-two but use approval voting instead of “pick only one candidate” voting. In approval voting you can vote for as many candidates as you like. 

In essence, instead of asking each voter which candidate they like best, you are asking how many voters like each candidate. The top-two candidates would actually be the most popular, not simply those who managed to get a small fraction of the first-choice votes that beat out the other candidates’ smaller fractions.

That’s a simple and effective way to improve our top-two primary for an office that only one person can hold, like the governor.

For elected bodies that will have many members, such as the state Legislature or our delegates to the U.S. House of Representatives, gerrymandering could be solved by creating electoral districts that elect more than one member at a time. 

You do that by instituting a proportional representation system, like those which have been used in most modern democracies for many, many years. Drawing the districts would be a much less contentious process, and the results would better reflect the views of the electorate — you know, a representative democracy.

Let’s not let flaws in the current system or the pressures of national political maneuvering lead us back to the equally flawed, previous electoral systems that badly needed reform to begin with.