(C) Daily Montanan This story was originally published by Daily Montanan and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Group pushes forward on ballot initiative efforts to change Montana's elections – Daily Montanan [1] ['Blair Miller', 'More From Author', '- October'] Date: 2023-10-27 A group of former Republican officials and a third-party candidate continue to push forward on their efforts to get two proposed constitutional amendments on next year’s ballot to reform primary and general elections for most of Montana’s key races. One proposal would create a single-ballot primary election in which all qualifying candidates running for a particular statewide office or legislative seat would square off, and the four candidates who receive the most votes would advance to the general election. Currently, voters choose which party’s primary they want to vote in. The second would subject those same offices to a majority-vote requirement, in which a candidate would have to top 50% of the vote in order to be elected. Currently, a candidate is elected when they receive the most votes in a race, even if they do not break the 50% threshold because there are three or more candidates in a race. Under the latter measure, Ballot Issue #13, the legislature would have to determine how a candidate would receive a majority of votes – whether it be through a run-off election or ranked-choice voting, though the 2023 legislature banned ranked-choice voting this year. “The intent of this is to give the voter more choices to put them back in control, so there’s not this tip of the funnel that special interests and political people take advantage of to try to influence our political system,” said one of the initiatives’ organizers, former Republican Rep. Frank Garner. “And to make sure that the people that we hire to govern are more concerned about what the majority of people they represent think than the guy in the office down the hallway.” Both measures were submitted by Montanans for Election Reform Action Fund, a coalition led by former Republican lawmakers Garner, Rob Cook, Bruce Tutvedt and Bruce Grubbs, as well as former Republican central committee member Ted Kronebusch, and Doug Campbell, who has run for legislative and congressional offices in Montana as an independent, Libertarian and Green Party candidate. While Attorney General Austin Knudsen found the top-four primary issue, Ballot Issue #12, to be legally insufficient earlier this month, saying it violated the state’s separate-vote provision and infringed on the legislature’s duties, the group filed a request with the Montana Supreme Court on Thursday asking it to reconsider Knudsen’s ruling. The group also withdrew Ballot Issue #11, which had been slated for a hearing in front of the State and Veterans Affairs Interim Committee Friday, in favor of moving forward with Ballot Issue #13, which is a more focused version of Issue #11, three of the people who submitted the issues said in interviews Friday. Issue #13 is currently under review by the Legislative Services Division. Cook, Garner and Campbell said their hope with the proposed constitutional amendments would be to empower more candidates outside of political parties to seek higher office and more voters to participate in primaries if they are not constrained to voting for candidates of a single party. They said they believe that requiring a candidate to receive a majority vote in a general election will force candidates to represent a broader swath of their constituents and not just a faction tied to a certain political ideology. “Anybody that’s followed the legislative process knows, for instance, when these special interests’ scorecards and pressure campaigns happen, it changes voting behavior. And when all of a sudden you put the majority of people in charge again of who’s going to get hired, it changes the calculus for people who are serving,” Garner said. In asking the Supreme Court to reconsider Knudsen’s opinion, which essentially found that provisions of the initiative were not closely enough related to a top-four primary system, the group argues that those provisions are “integral” to setting up the system. That would include a ban on requirements that a candidate be endorsed by a party to appear on a ballot, and a portion that says if a candidate is required to gather signatures to make the ballot, it will not have to be more than 5% of the votes received by the winning candidate in that race in the last election. Backers of the measure say the top-four primary system would be a vast improvement over some lawmakers’ failed attempts this spring to create a top-two primary for the U.S. Senate seat up in next year’s election, which they said blatantly targeted Se. Jon Tester, a Democrat, in a partisan manner. “A failed bill such as SB 566, which was aberrational in its focus on a single office, should not serve as the lodestar of this Court’s separate vote-requirement analysis,” the group wrote in its Supreme Court filing. Alaska voters in 2020 approved a top-four primary system that the backers of Montana’s initiative say is similar to what they are seeking, and the group also points to top-two primaries in California and Washington as to why their initiative should pass legal muster. They also argue that Knudsen’s finding that the proposal “regulates a matter traditionally entrusted to the Legislature” by getting involved in elections is incorrect, saying that if the initiative were approved for the ballot and then by voters, the legislature would have to administer the election framework. Campbell said the two proposed initiatives, in concert, would benefit not only Montana voters, the largest bloc of which are independents, but also candidates like him who do not affiliate with the two main parties. “If you’re a candidate who doesn’t affiliate, you can’t participate at all. You’re excluded from the equation,” he said. “And those candidates that I think we want, they’re from the independent group there because they represent the majority of Montanans,” he said. Garner compared the current primary system to a military chokepoint, in which the candidates are funneled into an increasingly tight space and a small amount of others can have an oversized impact on that group. He said he sees continuing the current system as an existential threat to democracy because of the influence of money and power in politics that could be changed under their proposals. “It is my informed opinion that if we don’t [change], the very nature of our Republic, the very existence of it, is at stake, and its future depends on us having the courage to be willing to make these fundamental reforms to demand more from that system and the people that serve in it,” he said. The group asked for an expedited answer from the Supreme Court on the Ballot Issue #12 legal opinion, while the other measure is still going through the legal process. If either are approved for signature gathering, the group would have to obtain signatures from 10% of the number of voters who voted in the 2020 governor’s race, as well as from 10% of voters in each of 40 legislative house districts. [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2023/10/27/group-pushes-forward-on-ballot-initiative-efforts-to-change-montanas-elections/ Published and (C) by Daily Montanan Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/montanan/