Democrats and California’s ‘Ranked Vote’ Governor Choice….

Great Idea , eh?

SO Good that Blue state California COULD have two Republicans as the only choice for voters in the coming November election?

Sometimes Democrats are stupid enough to screw themselves with being fair, instead of making sure they don’t lose an election….

We have seen with Trump that GIOPer’s focus on keeping power , NOT being ‘fair’….

 

The chair of the California Democratic party says he wants to get rid of the state’s idiosyncratic “open primary”, calling it a failure that risks pitting a crowded field of Democratic candidates against each other to the point where a Republican can be elected governor of one of the bluest states in the US.

“The current system we have does not work,” Rusty Hicks said in an interview. “It needs to be revised or repealed.”

Hicks argued that California’s free-for-all primary, in which voters are free to choose any candidate and the top two vote-winners advance regardless of party, was too prone to quirky outcomes and gamesmanship. He wants a different structure put to voters as early as this November.

With the weeks ticking down to the 2 June primary, Hicks is not the only Democrat losing sleep over the statistical possibility that the two leading Republicans for governor, Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco, could end up in first and second place because the six Democrats left in the race have failed to put enough distance between each other.

Such a scenario would be politically disastrous for the party at a time when it is counting on California as a bastion of resistance to the Trump administration and a model for alternative governance at home and abroad.

California Democrats enjoy a two-to-one registration advantage over Republicans, hold supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, and have not lost an election for statewide office since 2006.

“The stakes are so incredibly high,” Hicks said. “We have democracy itself under attack, and the United States [is no longer] the beacon of hope for democracies around the world the way it once was.”….

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The reform was not, however, the result of long and careful deliberation. Rather, it was hatched in a hurry to help resolve a short-term budgeting impasse and, according to critics across the political spectrum, has either failed to deliver on many of the benefits it promised or has exposed flaws that undermine its architects’ intentions.

“It was supposed to be a way of getting moderation, and an opportunity not to have one party dominate,” said Sara Sadhwani, a political science professor at Pomona College who also serves on the state redistricting commission. “The reality is that, despite the top-two primary, we have one-party domination in California and not a whole lot of moderation.”

The problem highlighted in the governor’s race – of intense competition on one side of the party divide scrambling the math – has arisen before and tripped up Republicans and Democrats. In 2012, two white Republicans running for a house seat in Redlands, east of Los Angeles, qualified for the general election even though the district was majority Democrat and majority Latino.

Two years later, something similar happened in a key swing district in the Antelope Valley north of LA, where the two parties run very close. Yet, instead of a Democrat and a Republican facing off in a general election, it got two Republicans….

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