I spoke to Bob Mulholland, campaign advisor for the California Dems, and he laid out for me just how much he's opposed to this: "Why are we spending a trillion dollars so the Iraqis can have multiple parties to choose from, and we ourselves in California say we're gonna make a system where maybe there'll be only one party to choose from."

You'd still have many parties and candidates to choose from in the "primary stage" where you go about choosing the top two. It will lead to the more moderate of the top two always winning though as the other party will always vote the lesser of their perceived "two evils" - just like the republicans voted in Conn, choosing to vote for Lieberman over Lamont.

I hope that Californians vote this awful "reform" down.

We have the top two primary here in Washington State. All it does is limits voters' choices in the general election.

In most districts, the winners of the "first round", aka primary, were a Democrat and a Republican. Because this was well known beforehand, a lot less people voted in the primary. The primary effectively became meaningless.

In several districts in Seattle, we had two Democrats running in the general election, while in parts of Eastern Washington, there were two Republicans running.

Another unintended consequence was that fewer third party candidates ran, since they had no hopes of making it to the general election.

It's a horrible idea and I hope that the citizens have the good sense to vote it down.

http://horsesass.org/?p=5888

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008090015_thirdparty04m.html

All it does is limits voters' choices in the general election.

Well, then, this is the soundbite to use.

Personally, I like this style much better than the current party-aligned primary system. I have never understood why our government spends so much money running an election for ostensibly private organizations. Now, if political parties wanted to hold their own elections, and only promote the winner in the election, I don't think there's much the state could do about it.

I also think this could help third-party candidates. Because the primary vote remains a free vote, in that it doesn't actually control who wins the election, people can vote for third-party candidates even if they are registered Democrats or Republicans. Or just to show displeasure with the big two. And a third-party candidate doesn't have to win a plurality to get to the general election, just come in second. So I think it should be easier to get second in the primary and then win a majority in the general election.

I completely disagree with the premise that this would lead to a lot of runoffs between members of the same party. In most districts, the majority party does not have the support of two-thirds of primary voters, so a candidate who receives solid support from the minority party is more likely to finish second in the blanket primary than the second-strongest candidate of the majority party.

I also agree with the point just made that the taxpayers are forced to spend millions of dollars so that the members-only organization known as the Republican party can conduct its primaries without incurring the expense of doing so.

What this does is disestablish the Republican Party as an automatic alternative in every general election. It would have to fight the Greens, Libertarians, and others for access to the November ballot. And while I would prefer the instant runoff system to this, I still think that this might be an improvement over the current system, where Republicans are given a ballot line rather than having to earn it, and where candidates can be elected with a minority of the vote case, as long as they get one more vote than anyone else.