Nonpartisan blanket primary
Type of primary election / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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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.