On Super Tuesday, as this issue went to press, voters in 15 states and one territory went to the polls and begrudgingly validated the inevitable. America is preparing for another presidential election pitting Donald Trump against Joe Biden.
The following morning, Nikki Haley, Trump’s only remaining serious Republican competitor, dropped out. But the real Super Tuesday runner-up is still in the running: “None of the Above” put in a surprisingly strong showing.
Nevada in the 1970s was the birthplace of many excellent ideas, and election reforms were no exception. The state’s “none of these candidates” option was introduced in 1976 and remains the most straightforward election language in the category.
Due to a series of byzantine complications — including Trump’s absence from the ballot and the existence of caucuses beyond primaries — “none of these candidates” performed better than all of the candidates listed in Nevada’s February Republican primary this year. ‘year. In fact, “none of these candidates” beat Haley, in second place, by 33 percentage points.
Republican signals this year were mixed in Nevada – most of the votes probably came from Trump fans – but in the Democratic primary, which was an easier case, “none of these candidates” still got a solid 5, 6%. More importantly, the long history of the “none of these candidates” option state provided material for the study. In a 2012 article published on Political Research Quarterly, researchers at the University of Utah found that voters who checked that box on their ballots sent “a less ambiguous signal of discontent than other nonvoters.” In other words, the existence of the “none of these candidates” option allows researchers – and presumably office-seekers – to better distinguish between the various reasons why someone might choose not to vote for traditional candidates.
Showing up to vote but refusing to vote for anyone who shows up on the ballot takes effort and can therefore be an effective way for voters to express their displeasure to decision makers.
Not surprisingly, in a presidential contest that promises to feature two well-known and historically unpopular candidates, the interest in sending that “signal of discontent” was notable and noted on Super Tuesday.
Different states have different mechanisms for how to label, count, and interpret their “none of the above votes.” The specific ballot language for that category varies: Minnesota voters have an “uncommitted” voting option on their primary ballots, while Massachusetts and North Carolina have a “no preference” option. Some variations appeared on the Democratic ballot in Alabama and Tennessee. After Super Tuesday there were campaigns for the “uncommitted” vote in Georgia and Washington.
In Colorado’s Democratic primary, voters were given the opportunity to select an “uncommitted delegate,” signaling their reluctance to fully support any candidate. The option was added in December by party leadership with the aim of encouraging young voters to participate even if they were not fond of Biden. These uncommitted delegates have constraints on how they can vote at the convention, but they would have more autonomy than a committed delegate and could add more volatility and interest. This time in Colorado, the uncommitted vote did not pass the 15% threshold for delegate representation, but more than 51,000 voters, or 8.9%, preferred the protest option.
Many of those who voted casually in the Democratic Super Tuesday election were behind a campaign to signal discontent with Joe Biden, particularly over his handling of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. These voters were building on the surprising success of the “Listen to Michigan” campaign, which garnered 101,000 uncommitted votes in the previous week’s Michigan primary, largely from the state’s significant population of Arab-American voters, but also from more young people, who tend to be more dissatisfied with Biden’s foreign policy than older partisans. Interestingly, a hard-to-quantify subset of those voters were Armenian-Americans, furious about an entirely different American commitment abroad: continued aid to an increasingly genocidal Azerbaijan. Unlike Colorado, Michigan will send unpledged delegates to the convention. Under Michigan rules, these delegates are essentially free agents.
In another Super Tuesday state, Virginia, there was no “none of the above” option. In that state, protest voters were urged to vote for Marianne Williamson, who got 7.8 percent. It’s hard to say how many of those voters were sincere Williamson fans rather than people angry about Biden’s foreign policy. Having a real “none of the above” option would have allowed voters to signal their preferences more clearly.
In each of these states, you can tell a different story about what exactly the “none of the above” vote signals. Biden’s foreign policy campaign, for example, represents a somewhat unusual turn for this cycle, but it is not unprecedented. For this reason, many electoral reform activists prefer to focus on diverse proposals, such as ranked-choice voting, and activists may prefer to run single-issue candidates to allow voters to communicate the strength of their feelings on a particular topic. (The No Labels effort is a variation on that theme, in which voters could use that ticket in the general election to convey dissatisfaction with partisanship and polarization. However, it should not be confused with a “none of the above” vote.)
But at the most basic level, they all mean the same thing: Voters aren’t thrilled about their options.
Research confirms this: a 2020 working paper published by the Vienna University of Economics and Business, based on surveys conducted in the weeks before the 2016 US presidential election and the 2016 Austrian presidential run-off, found that ballot manipulation election to include a “none” option above” increased turnout. It also skewed votes away from “non-establishment candidates,” which matches the Virginia results and could be a warning to reformers they would instead prefer to leverage statistics from third-party options.
“None of the above,” the researchers explain, is “chosen more frequently by protest-motivated voters, who are dissatisfied with the proposed candidate or with the political establishment in general” – an increasingly common condition as part of post-primary elections. 2024 elections are starting to take off.