August 1, 2024 9:34AM # Election Policy Roundup II By [Walter Olson](https://www.cato.org/people/walter-olson) --- SHARE Listen to this article Generated with [ ElevenLabs](https://elevenlabs.io/) AI technology. Loading the [Elevenlabs Text to Speech](https://elevenlabs.io/text-to-speech) AudioNative Player... Here’s another roundup of short-form items on election law and policy: - For all the occasional creakiness of our decentralized way of holding elections under the Constitution, the reports from Venezuela make me again glad that we never developed a centralized, result-announcing national electoral commission. - Past studies have been inconclusive on whether ranked-choice voting (RCV) in itself raises turnout. A [new study says](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026137942400074X) it does: “We find significant and substantially higher probabilities of turnout in places that use RCV,” possibly because it incentivizes campaigns to reach out to a wider range of voters. Note also that the combination of RCV with a single universal qualifying primary open to all voters and candidates—the “Final Four” or “Final Five” model—was associated with robust turnout when Alaska adopted it, according to work by the [Bipartisan Policy Center](https://bipartisanpolicy.org/download/?file=/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Primary-Turnout-Report_R03.pdf) and the [Sightline Institute](https://www.sightline.org/2024/06/03/voter-participation-jumped-when-alaska-opened-its-primaries/). - Speaking of turnout, there is more evidence for a trend I’ve [touched on before](https://www.cato.org/blog/suppression-or-no-most-voting-changes-dont-alter-partisan-outcomes): while high turnout has historically tended to benefit Democrats, that correlation has faded and may even have reversed as poorer, less-educated, and low-civic-attachment voters increasingly favor Republicans. That has major implications for the politics of election reform: Expect partisans to begin moderating or even swapping sides on various process questions that are seen as encouraging or discouraging high turnout ([Thomas Edsall](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/26/opinion/democrats-republicans-coalitions-electorate.html), [Nicholas Stephanopoulos](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4871529), [Nate Cohn](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/upshot/election-democrats-republicans-turnout-trump.html), [Ilya Somin](https://reason.com/volokh/2024/06/15/more-evidence-that-republicans-are-now-the-party-that-benefits-from-high-voter-turnout/); [straws in the wind](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/01/democrats-voter-registration-minorities/) on enthusiasm for nonpartisan voter registration drives). - “We are at the beginning of a global movement. We are going to outlaw political lying,” said a politician in Wales, where the Labour Party–led regional government is [preparing a bill](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/02/welsh-government-commits-to-making-lying-in-politics) “for the disqualification of members and candidates found guilty of deliberate deception through an independent judicial process.” Let me predict here and now that such a law either will be ineffective at turning politicians honest or will become a subject of selective if not malicious enforcement, or both. (Read more on the policing of electoral lies in my blog post “[General Bans on Election Untruths Would Violate the First Amendment](https://www.cato.org/blog/advocates-seek-punish-election-untruths).”) - In California’s Central Valley, a no-contest plea by a Lodi city councilman charged with election felonies sounds a very real alarm about the problems with [ballot harvesting](https://www.cato.org/blog/trouble-ballot-harvesting). Note, however, [one dimension absent](https://electionlawblog.org/?p=142066): per the San Joaquin County registrar, “California’s voting system didn’t immediately flag the ballots tied to Khan because the people being registered were real citizens with legitimate information.” ##### Related Tags [Constitution and Law](https://www.cato.org/constitution-law), [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).