Reform elections to make them less partisan

In a gov­ern­ment of, by and for the peo­ple, choos­ing who will lead and serve us is a sacred duty, not to be tak­en lightly.

It isn’t pos­si­ble to be a respon­si­ble vot­er if all you know about can­di­dates is their par­ty affiliation.

Those who haven’t done their home­work should stay home and let those who take cit­i­zen­ship seri­ous­ly choose our leaders.

Better yet, they should edu­cate them­selves to become bet­ter voters.

They should read news­pa­per arti­cles. Listen to radio inter­views. Watch tele­vised debates. Attend can­di­date forums and ask ques­tions. Don’t be gullible. Don’t decide how to vote based on mali­cious ads, Facebook posts, or who has the most yard signs.

And don’t go into the polling booth unpre­pared and check a sin­gle box to select all the Democrats or all the Republicans on the ballot.

That’s not a respon­si­ble way to vote, and it shouldn’t be an option.

In fact, it isn’t an option in most states.

According to the National Conference of State Legislators, Kentucky is one of only six states that allow straight-tick­et vot­ing. The oth­ers are Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.

Americans increas­ing­ly believe that our coun­try is too divid­ed. A Politico poll pub­lished two days before the 2025 gen­er­al elec­tion found that near­ly three out of five sur­veyed said polar­iza­tion was worse than it was five years ago. Among those 65 and old­er, almost four out of five felt that way.

One way to bridge the gap would be to make elec­tions less partisan.

No straight-ticket voting

During his one term in the state leg­is­la­ture, Les Yates spon­sored a bipar­ti­san bill, HB   227, that would have amend­ed KRS 117.381 to remove straight-par­ty vot­ing as an option in a reg­u­lar election.

It was intro­duced on Jan. 9, 2020 and sent to the Elections, Constitutional Amendments and Intergovernmental Affairs Committee, where it died.

Cherlynn Stevenson, a Democrat who served with the Republican Yates in the House, recalled that “his own par­ty pri­maried him and got rid of him.”

Three Democrats who were also spon­sors of the bill — Joe Graviss, Maria Sorolis, and Wilson Stone — also were not re-elect­ed or chose not to run.

Sometimes doing the right thing can be cost­ly, but it’s still right.

I hope that in the 2026 leg­isla­tive ses­sion, some­one will have the courage to spon­sor a sim­i­lar bipar­ti­san bill and it will become law, bring­ing Kentucky in line with the 44 states that encour­age peo­ple to think before they vote.

In the 47 years that I’ve been a vot­er, I’ve nev­er vot­ed straight par­ty. That’s because I can’t remem­ber an elec­tion in which I thought the best can­di­date in every race was a Democrat or a Republican. If I ever did think that, it wouldn’t be a bur­den to take anoth­er minute to look over the bal­lot and mark each candidate’s name individually.

It isn’t a lot to ask.

Avoid open primaries

The way Yates remem­bered it when I inter­viewed him for his can­di­date pro­file (he’s run­ning again for state rep­re­sen­ta­tive after serv­ing a term as coun­ty judge-exec­u­tive) is that the elec­tion bill he spon­sored was to allow open pri­maries. But I searched and couldn’t find a final ver­sion of an elec­tions bill he spon­sored that includ­ed that.

According to Ballotpedia, a non­par­ti­san and non­prof­it, online polit­i­cal ency­clo­pe­dia, as of February of this year, 15 states allowed open pri­maries and some allowed inde­pen­dents — but not mem­bers of the oth­er par­ty — to vote in a party’s primaries.

A few oth­ers, includ­ing Ohio and Tennessee, allowed vot­ers to decide on pri­ma­ry Election Day which party’s bal­lot they want­ed, but they could­n’t ask for both.

I don’t like those ideas. They open the door to mis­chief by allow­ing mem­bers of one par­ty to med­dle in the oth­er party’s nom­i­nat­ing process.

In recent years, it has been a strat­e­gy for Democrats to vote in Republican pri­maries in order to nom­i­nate the most extreme can­di­dates because they think those Republicans would be the eas­i­est for Democrats to beat in a gen­er­al elec­tion. But that’s a dan­ger­ous game. Often it doesn’t work, and the extrem­ists get elected.

Republicans prob­a­bly have employed the same tac­tics, but it doesn’t make it less wrong that both sides do it.

Why not ranked choice?

The pur­pose of a pri­ma­ry is to select the party’s can­di­dates for the gen­er­al elec­tion. If any­one can par­tic­i­pate in a party’s pri­ma­ry regard­less of their par­ty affil­i­a­tion, what’s the point of hav­ing a primary?

Just have ranked-choice vot­ing instead. That’s where those with the least votes are elim­i­nat­ed and the top con­tenders, regard­less of par­ty, move on to the next phase, just as we do in non­par­ti­san pri­ma­ry races for city offi­cials, judges and school board members.

I think the ranked choice idea has some mer­it, but I’d like to see how it plays out in oth­er states before Kentucky con­sid­ers it.

The goal of ranked choice vot­ing is to have more mod­er­ate and rea­son­able can­di­dates rather than rad­i­cals. But it may not work in states like California or Texas, where one par­ty has a huge major­i­ty and the most par­ti­san activists con­trol the ground game.

Changing party affiliation

Finally, the thing about Kentucky’s elec­tion laws that irks me most is that if you want to change your par­ty reg­is­tra­tion, you must do so by Dec. 31 of the year before the elections.

That’s absurd!

No oth­er state comes close to requir­ing vot­ers to decide on a par­ty so far ahead of the pri­maries. And what’s so egre­gious about it is that vot­ers don’t even know who the can­di­dates are going to be on each party’s bal­lot until about the sec­ond week of January, because many politi­cians wait until the dead­line or a few days before the dead­line to file their papers.

This year, there are no Democratic pri­ma­ry races in Clark County for coun­ty offices, but sev­er­al coun­ty offices have two or more can­di­dates in the Republican primaries.

I think many vot­ers would like to have known that before they had to decide how to register.

Most states allow vot­ers to change their par­ty affil­i­a­tion by the last day to reg­is­ter before the pri­ma­ry, which is usu­al­ly about a month before the election.

That makes sense. If you have to change your address because you moved, why not change your par­ty at the same time? That’s enough time to print bal­lots or allow vot­ers who qual­i­fy for absen­tee bal­lots to request them.

Although I don’t think peo­ple should be allowed to decide which par­ty’s pri­ma­ry they want to vote in on Primary Election Day or vote in the pri­ma­ry of the par­ty to which they belong, I think they should not have to decide on a par­ty almost a half a year before the pri­maries. That’s just too restrictive. 

2027 is an off year for elec­tions in Kentucky, so leg­is­la­tors in this ses­sion should intro­duce a bipar­ti­san bill to make the dead­line for chang­ing par­ty reg­is­tra­tion the same date as the reg­u­lar vot­er reg­is­tra­tion dead­line and have it in place for the 2028 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion year.

Kentucky should no longer be an outlier.