Only about 20% of registered Chicago voters turned out for the recent June 28th primary election, which means 80% didn’t participate in the democratic process — and that’s 80% of registered voters, not 80% of eligible voters. In deep-blue cities where Democratic candidates almost always win, Democratic primaries are arguably more consequential than the general election, yet this year 80% of Chicago voters chose not to vote in any party primary.
While rates of voter participation have reached historical lows, there have been staggeringly high rates of dollar participation. According to the New York Times, the Illinois governor’s race is on track to be the most expensive non-presidential race in U.S. history. In the Republican gubernatorial primary election alone, three billionaires — hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, shipping magnate Richard Uihlein, and sitting governor J.B. Pritzker — have contributed millions. Griffin spent $50 million to support moderate Republican Richard Irvin, Uihlein spent $9 million to support Trump-endorsed far-right candidate Darren Bailey, and Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker (together with the Democratic Governor’s Association, which he funds) spent $35 million to support… far-right candidate Darren Bailey (who won).
Yes, the incentives of our political system are such that Illinois Democrats are bankrolling the far right. And it’s totally rational, at least in terms of short term political interests: it’s more likely that Pritzker will be able to defeat Darren Bailey, who has referred to Chicago as a “hellhole” and has introduced legislation to kick Chicago out of the state, than Richard Irvin, a moderate suburban Black mayor and fiscal conservative who has been willing to criticize Donald Trump.
Pritzker’s millions went to funding ads attacking Irvin for being too cozy with Pritzker and “attacking” Bailey for being “too conservative for Illinois.” According to the New York Times, “No candidate for any office is believed to have ever spent more to meddle in another party’s primary.” Although the tactic will almost certainly succeed in the short-term, I worry that the millions spent by Democrats to strengthen an extremist far-right ideology will negatively affect political culture in ways that could lead to disastrous long-term consequences.
What needs to change so that we fix these misaligned incentives and motivate voters to actually participate in the Democratic process?
Well, my favored solution would be to abolish Illinois’s governorship and Senate — why should a state government use a political structure designed for a federal system? — and transition to a European-style parliamentary democracy, with the head of state chosen by the House of Representatives, with some form of proportional representation to ensure multiparty participation, plus federal legislation to override Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to get big money out of politics. Any of these changes would help make politics more about ideas and less about strategy, removing perverse incentives and giving voters more meaningful choices, likely encouraging increased participation. But unfortunately, we all know none of this is going to happen anytime soon, and probably unlikely to happen anytime this century. So what can we do instead?
I propose two more practical solutions: 1) make voting easier by making information more accessible to voters via sample ballots and voter information guides, and 2) start laying the groundwork for a transition to approval voting, the most viable type of electoral reform that significantly improves political incentives.
Election Accessibility: Sample Ballots and Voter Information Guides
I suspect that the main obstacle to voting in Chicago and one of the main drivers of low voter turnout is that voting here is confusing. Ballots are long. We vote on a lot of things: Metropolitan Water Reclamation District Commissioners, numerous positions related to state and county finances (Treasurer, Comptroller, Clerk, Assessor, Board of Review), and long lists of judges. A voter has to take time to find out what’s on the ballot, look up what positions like “comptroller” even mean, and look up dozens of candidates and decide whom to support. It can take many hours to do all of that, and most people’s work and family responsibilities don’t afford them that kind of time. The lack of accessible information functions as a kind of digital literacy test: people who don’t use computers a lot might not even know how to find out what’s on the ballot, and thus feel discouraged from participating.
When I was growing up in Florida, I remember that voters would be sent a sample ballot before each election. This doesn’t happen in Chicago. You can go to the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners website, put in your address, and download a sample ballot, but I don’t think most voters are proactive enough to do that or even know it’s an option. Along with all the election ads Chicago residents get in the mail, there’s no reason they shouldn’t also receive a sample ballot, whether registered voters or not — or at very minimum they should receive clear instructions in the mail about how to request or access one.
California goes beyond sending voters a sample ballot and sends an extensive Voter Information Guide describing the role of each position and providing candidate statements, so that voters don’t have to spend hours surfing the internet to find that same information. Illinois — and Chicago, and Cook County — should do the same.
These obvious reforms would make participation in the democratic process more accessible to Chicagoans. Would they also improve voter turnout? I don’t know. Hopefully somewhat. But Los Angeles, despite the availability of Voter Information Guides, had even worse turnout than Chicago in its recent primary — below 15%. Sample Ballots and Voter Information Guides are the bare minimum; if we actually want high participation, we also need to consider structural changes to our elections to make voters more excited about their range of choices.
The Easiest Way to Transform Elections: Approval Voting
The strategic incentives that lead Democrats to fund far-right candidates are embedded in the “choose-one” plurality voting method that we use. On ballots in Chicago, most races include the instruction “Vote for One.” Approval voting simply changes the instruction to “Vote for One or More” or “Vote for All You Approve Of.” Voters vote for as many candidates as they want, and the candidate with the most votes wins. This prevents voters from having to decide between their honest favorite and their strategic choice; they can simply vote for both. Approval voting is currently used in Fargo, ND and St. Louis, MO, both cities having adopted it in recent years after landslide victories of citizen-led ballot initiatives. Seattle will be voting on an initiative this November to switch to approval voting.
If we used approval voting in Illinois, it wouldn’t make any sense for Governor Pritzker to fund Darren Bailey’s ads. Richard Irvin would just be able to run as an independent in the general election without having to worry about splitting the vote, and he could very well be a competitive candidate; some conservative Republicans would vote for Darren Bailey and cast a strategic vote for Richard Irvin, who would also draw votes from independents and conservative Democrats. This would force Pritzker and Irvin to compete to actually persuade voters rather than rely on strategic machinations. Voter participation might improve because the ultimate outcome wouldn’t seem like a foregone conclusion.
I would strongly prefer an incentive structure that maintains competitive elections, even in cases when it makes the outcome less certain for my preferred progressive candidate, because it would be better for the long-term health of our democracy. The perverse incentives of plurality voting, which, even without cross-party meddling, function to artificially disadvantage moderate candidates and prop up extremists like Darren Bailey, are an underlying driver of the toxic polarization tearing this country apart.
Approval voting, merely entailing a change in ballot instructions, is the simplest way of preventing vote splitting — the phenomenon where similar candidates weaken each others’ chances by competing for the same subset of voters. Vote splitting is a real problem in Illinois, undermining the legitimacy of election outcomes. For example, in the 2019 nonpartisan mayoral election, Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle advanced to a runoff despite the fact that two thirds of Chicago voters didn’t vote for either candidate in the first round. In the recent June 28 primary elections (based on the results tallied at the time of writing) there were nine U.S. House primaries in Illinois for major party candidates where the winning candidate got under 45% of the vote, and seven of those candidates got under 40%. The most extreme example was in the crowded Democratic race to replace Bobby Rush in the 1st district, where the winning candidate, Jonathan Jackson, only won about 28% of the vote. In addition, the winner of the Illinois Republican primary for U.S. Senate, Kathy Salvi, only won about 30% of the vote. In any of these races, it’s possible that vote splitting might have altered the result, and that another candidate might better represent the true preferences of the voters.
Can we actually get approval voting in Illinois? Unfortunately, it’s an uphill battle. Unlike many other states such as Missouri, Illinois doesn’t permit citizens to initiate binding ballot measures except in very specific contexts, even at the municipal level. This means that in order to switch to approval voting, whether in Chicago or at the state level, politicians would have to be convinced to change the very rules that enabled them to get elected, which is exceedingly unlikely to happen. However, it may eventually be possible to convince politicians to change the election code restricting ballot measures. If more U.S. municipalities and eventually states start adopting approval voting via citizen-driven ballot measures, approval voting will gain wider awareness, and some alderpeople and state legislators may begin to champion it, and there may be hope. While Illinois isn’t likely to get approval voting in the near future, I suspect it might become a real possibility within the next decade.
Additional Notes:
- The Center for Election Science is a nonprofit organization that helps organize approval voting ballot measures. Supporting that organization is likely the most effective to accelerate the adoption of approval voting.
- Why approval voting and not ranked-choice instant-runoff voting, which has already been adopted in New York City and the state of Maine? While I would prefer ranked-choice voting over the current system, I think it is over-hyped and less practical than approval voting. In short, ranked-choice voting requires a ballot redesign and more complicated process for tallying results, yet it doesn’t do as an effective job as approval voting at reducing vote splitting or electing accurately representative winners. I also think approval voting has a better chance of helping third parties. (See this more detailed comparison from Center for Election Science.) STAR voting is another alternative I would be thrilled to see, arguably even better than approval voting, but it also requires ballot redesign and doesn’t yet have a track record of winning support from voters. Chicago ballots are already intimidating to voters, and making them more complicated might not be an ideal way to boost participation. Approval voting is far from perfect, but it works better than ranked-choice voting, it’s simpler to administer, and support for it in many U.S. states polls around 70%, so I think it currently represents the most practical medium-term path towards reform in Illinois.
- Are the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District elections similar to approval voting? Only superficially. There’s a 9-person Board of Commissioners elected for 6-year terms, three at a time every two years. There is typically a large number of candidates, and the instructions on the ballot read “Vote for no more than Three,” with the three candidates with the most votes winning. This isn’t approval voting, but plurality block voting, which is even worse than normal plurality voting. Block plurality voting is the same method used by the village of Skokie to elect its Board of Trustees, which has resulted in single-party rule there for decades. (There is currently an effort in Skokie to overcome one-party rule by switching to a ward-based system via citizen-led ballot initiatives that conform to the very specific contexts in the Illinois municipal code where such initiatives are binding.) For multi-winner elections like the MWRD elections, proportional representation would produce more representative outcomes, with proportional approval voting being one option.
- It’s also important to recognize that the June 28 primary election was the first election since redistricting, when Illinois engaged in extreme partisan gerrymandering to benefit Democrats at both the state and federal levels, presumably rationalized to counter Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression in other states. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and cross-party funding all fit a larger cyclical pattern of polarization-driven democratic backsliding in the U.S., leading to steadily declining U.S. scores on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index. Widespread adoption of approval voting could interrupt this cycle by helping elect more bridge-building consensus-style candidates, diffusing tensions and lowering the stakes of elections so that the basic foundations of U.S. democracy are no longer at risk.
