A week of facts and figures



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Hi Friend,



It's every employee's favorite Thursday and Friday — the start of the men's
and women's NCAA basketball tournaments. Now that everyone's finished
researching their brackets and picking their Final Fours... how about Three
Things on a different kind of research — of electoral reform, not Cinderella
stories — to send you into the weekend?





Ultra-partisan representatives are garnering more air-time
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When it comes to airtime, the most partisan voices are the ones that permeate
the news cycle most. Don’t just take it from us, either — there is data to back
it up. A new study identified the seven most “hyper-partisan” members of
Congress and the seven most bipartisan members based on their promotion of
bipartisanship and work across the aisle in 2021 and 2022. After analyzing the
group for two months, the researchers from George Mason University and the
nonprofit Starts With US found that the seven most partisan politicians reaped
more than four times the coverage of their least-partisan colleagues! As
reported byThe Hill
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,“the most partisan member of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, generated
nearly 10 times as much press coverage in the 2022 election cycle as the least
partisan member, Don Bacon.”



While this data is disheartening, it doesn’t come as a surprise. As our
executive director, Nick Troiano, noted in arecent Tweet
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primaries elect them. Partisan media amplify them. Then we wonder why we're so
divided.”



Check out Troiano’s recent interview with MSNBC, where he discusses how the
Primary Problem contributes to explosive sound bites from hyper-partisan
members of Congress.
 

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A new report provides data supporting the efficacy of the “Alaska Model”
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The McKinley Research Group released a report
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breaking down polling about how the “Alaska Model” fared during the 2022
election. The report compiled findings demonstrating that ranked choice voting
was well received across several factors, from race, to gender, to geographic
location — the latter a particularly interesting finding, given the unique
challenges of implementing a new reform in a state with so many remote voting
precincts. (If they can do it there…)

The results from this analysis provide evidence that “voters feel they have
more choice — i.e., better candidates to choose from — than in previous
elections… and the new system increases voter-perceived power.” In other words,
the findings from the report illustrate that Alaska’s innovative election
reform did precisely what it intended — it gave voters more representative
choices, a more meaningful say, and yielded more bipartisan campaigns.



Notably, this report found that among Republicans, 70% thought ranked choice
voting was simple, nearly 50% thought candidate quality was about the same or
better than in past years, and 63% thought their voter power was about the same
or better than in previous years. They’re numbers that make a powerful case for
theAlaska Model’s
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efficacy and continued use — not just there, but in other states where voters
are considering it, such as Nevada.





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Election reforms are needed to produce higher voter turnout
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You might recall that Bipartisan Policy Center report
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about primary election turnout; it’s getting more national pickup this week.
Sinclair News communicated some of its key findings to local news affiliates
across the country:



The report also calls for reforming how states conduct their primaries so that
more voters can participate.



"In Pennsylvania, you had a very competitive Republican Senate primary, a
Democratic Senate primary and a highly competitive Republican governor primary.
Pennsylvania currently doesn't allow independents to participate in any of
those," [co-author Michael] Thorning explained. "What that means is that about
a million voters in that state didn't have any way to weigh in on who the
candidates would be in November during the general election.”
 


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Regards,



Alana
__
Alana Persson
Unite America

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