[EL] Top Two posterchild? Two R's advance in a D-leaning, 70% racial minority House district

[Rob Richie]

I believe there are important reasons to be concerned about Top Two systems
-- not the least of which is that California apparently had its lowest
congressional primary turnout in modern history this week, but eliminated
nearly every candidate not running with a major party label and left us
with five months of at most one-on-one races, including some where a
"contest of ideas" (as represented by different parties) morphs into
something quite different (two people of the same party).

There's one particular outcome I wanted to highlight: U.S. House District
31.

As the data shows below, this district is a Democratic-leaning district
where Democrats have a voter registration edge of 41% to 36% (with the rest
no party) It also is less than 30% white, nearly majority Latino, although
I assume not among eligible voters.

And yet... for the next five months, the only candidates in this district
are going to be two Republicans: incumbent Gary Miller, who won 26.7%
yesterday, and Republican Bob Dutton (who won 24.9%). A Latino Democrat
finished with 22.8%, but he got knocked out. All three remaining candidates
ran as Democrats. If any of them had not run, then Aguilar may well have
finished second. Certainly if none of them had run, Aguilar would have
likely been over 40% of the vote and easily into the runoff.

The fact that the two Republicans won just over 50% in no way means that
this is a Republican-majority district, of course. Indeed, there's another
heavily Latino district where a Republican won more than 50%  of the vote
yesterday, but I suspect will have a tough race in November in a turnout
that is higher and more reflective of the state.

FairVote presented voting rights concerns to the DOJ when it was deciding
whether to preclear the Top Two system. We knew it would have been a very
tough call to deny preclearance based on hypotheticals, but.... this kind
of outcome definitely could be anticipated.

I'll note that various Californians on this list are quick to criticize
outcomes they think are unfair for ranked choice voting elections. If RCV
had been used here in reducing the field to two, you likely wouldn't have
had this result. If RCV were used in November, youl'd have full electorates
weighing the full spectrum. A middle ground would be to reduce the field to
four or five candidates, then use RCV in November -- keeping a real
spectrum of choice, but still doing some of the things that Top Two
advocates want.

- Rob Richie

#####
http://graphics.latimes.com/california-primary-june-5-2012/#/us_house/5945


U.S. House District 31 San Bernardino
Precincts reporting: *100%* (439/439)
 PartyVotesPercent Gary Miller* GOP14,057 26.7%Bob Dutton GOP13,088 24.9%Pete
Aguilar Dem12,016 22.8%Justin Kim Dem7,083 13.5%Renea Wickman Dem3,446 6.5%Rita
Ramirez-Dean Dem2,966 5.6%*Incumbent
Demographics
 Asian
7.9%
 Black
11.5%
 Latino
49.4%
 Other
1.5%
 White
29.7%
Party registration
Dem *40.9% *
GOP *35.6%*
No party / other *23.6%*

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Respect for Every Vote and Every Voice"

Rob Richie
Executive Director

FairVote
6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 610
Takoma Park, MD 20912
www.fairvote.org  <http://www.fairvote.org> rr at fairvote.org
(301) 270-4616

Please support FairVote through action and tax-deductible donations -- see
http://fairvote.org/donate. For federal employees, please consider  a gift
to us through the Combined Federal Campaign (FairVote's  CFC number is
10132.) Thank you!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20120606/83370532/attachment.html>