After the controversy and confusion Washington's new primary system caused in the most recent primary election, a group has begun an initiative to change the election process once again.
Members of Instant Runoff Voting for Washington wrote Initiative 318 to create a runoff election system that eliminates the primary.

"What we're trying to accomplish is a significant improvement in democracy," group secretary Paul McClintock said.

In the current primary election system, voters must declare a party affiliation and vote only for candidates in that party.

In a runoff election, several candidates run for the same office, and voters would have the opportunity to choose a candidate as their first choice and another candidate as their second choice in a single election.

After election officials tally all the votes, candidates with the top two scores -- regardless of party -- stay in the race while the remaining candidates are removed from the race.

Voters whose first-choice candidate received fewer votes than the top two candidates would have their ballots recalculated based on their second choices.

The second-choice votes of those voters would then be counted and added to the top two contenders' scores, McClintock said.

The group proposes to change the system so the election process will better reflect the opinions of the people, he said.

"It restores majority rules," he said. "There are a lot of disenfranchised voters who might support a third-party candidate, but because of the monopoly the two parties have on the system, you might never find out what the true feelings of the populace are."

People who support third-party candidates may have less fear of losing their vote because they have a secondary choice, Western political science professor Todd Donovan said.

Without that fear, the true backing of independent candidates would become more publicly apparent, Donovan said.

The initiative also would save an estimated $15 million, which the state spends each election year to conduct primary elections, he said.

Along with the advantages the runoff election system may have, eliminating the primary may also have disadvantages, Donovan said. The primary gives voters control of the political parties' nominations, but without the primary, the parties will have more control in declaring their official candidates, he said.

"You'll have more democracy in November and less democracy in September," Donovan said.

While the process would not eliminate other candidates from the running as it would in the primary process, it would give candidates official backing.

"It will be like going back to 100 years ago when voters didn't play a big roll in picking their party's nominee," Donovan said. "(Some voters) have a distrust of parties, and they don't want to give up primaries."

Chiho Lai, a Western sophomore and president of Campus Democrats, said the absence of a primary would hurt the solidarity of the parties behind their candidates if members of the same party challenged one another.

The primary gives voters and parties the opportunity to endorse the best candidate and also simplifies the general election, he said.

"From my understanding, before the parties pick their endorsement, they are split," Lai said. "When there are 20 candidates on the ballot (for the same position), it's difficult for voters to understand where all the candidates on the ballot stand."

Donovan said the political parties would most likely back a single candidate prior to the election, but other unofficial candidates also might run under the party ticket.

Voters, however, would probably support the official candidate, he said.

McClintock said cities that implemented runoff voting have seen a decrease in negative campaigning.

Because candidates running for the same office under this system could both represent the same party, candidates conduct a more civilized discourse.

"Candidates don't want to alienate voters who initially support other candidates," McClintock said. "This has led to elections being more issue-oriented than character-assassination oriented."

Donovan said that whether this initiative passes, it sets in motion a process to develop a better voting system than the current partisan primary.