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A nonpartisan blanket primary is a primary election in which all candidates for the same elected office run against each other at once, regardless of the political party. Partisan elections are, on the other hand, segregated by political party. Nonpartisan blanket primaries are slightly different from the two-round system in that the first round takes place alongside other primary elections, and the second round is never skipped (even if one candidate receives a majority in the first round).
In most cases, two winners advance to the general election, in which case it is also called a top-two primary. If more than two candidates are selected for the general election, it may be known as a top-four primary.[1] It is also known as a jungle primary.[2]
Advocates claimed the system would elect more moderate candidates, since winning might require appealing to voters of both parties in a two-party system.[3][4][5] However, research on California's primaries have shown no increase in moderate candidates,[6] and no increase in turnout among nonpartisan voters.[7][4] Social choice theorists have generally favored other voting systems to alleviate this problem, such as Condorcet methods (which satisfy the median voter property) or a unified primary based on approval voting for its first round (which does not suffer from the same center squeeze effect).[5][8][9]
Such primaries are susceptible to vote-splitting: the more candidates from the same party run in the primary, the more likely that party is to lose.[5][3][10][11]
The top-two system is used for all primaries in Washington and California (except presidential primaries). Alaska began using a top-four primary system in the 2022 Alaska's at-large congressional district special election using ranked-choice runoffs.
The theory was that candidates would be forced to moderate their appeals to win a broader section of the electorate. ... leading to a November ballot between two candidates from the same party. That would happen if multiple candidates from the same party crowded the ballot, canceling each other out as they divided a finite group of voters
The idea was that by opening up primaries to all voters, regardless of party, a flood of new centrist voters would arrive. That would give moderate candidates a route to victory .. Candidates did not represent voters any better after the reforms, taking positions just as polarized as they did before the top two. We detected no shift toward the ideological middle.
This approach aims to soften how partisan the winners are. ... support for the middle is divided among three candidates (we call this vote-splitting). Plurality's winners are largely determined not by the merit of the candidates, but rather by who else is running.
neither the Citizens Redistricting Commission nor the top-two primary immediately halted the continuing partisan polarization of California's elected lawmakers or their drift away from the average voter
Two groups that were predicted by advocates to increase their participation in response to this reform—those registered with third parties or no-party-preference registrants (independents) who were not guaranteed a vote in any party's primary before the move to the top-two—also show declines in turnout
If too many candidates from one edge of the political spectrum enter the same race without a clear frontrunner, they risk splitting their side of the vote, canceling each other out, and handing the top two spots to the opposition party.
The two Republicans might get 25 percent of the vote apiece, while the Democrats each receive 5 percent.
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