Why should the master lever be eliminated? It has nothing to do with race or socioeconomic class of voters. It’s simple. Some voters who use it don’t fully understand what it means and more importantly, it affects the integrity of elections on downballot and especially non-partisan races.

Today, RIPR’s Scott MacKay wrote a column and misinterpreted data that actually proves the opposite of his argument. Master lever voting harms the election process.

Let’s start with his data. First, he shows two charts of data that display the number of master lever votes in the 2010 and 2012 general election for the thirteen RI House districts. 2012 was a presidential election year and 2010 was not. We can already see differences in those years and how the voters use the master lever.

In 2010 the master lever was used in Providence on 24% of the ballots, the 12th and 11th districts choosing to use it the most with 43% and 41% respectively. Then look at the presidential election year, 2012 where the usage jumped to 49.5% of the ballots. I’m not cherrypicking data here, I’m just using what MacKay offers. I’m also not saying anything about the demographics, again all I have for data is what MacKay chose to use, Providence. And yes, that is virtually half of the ballots cast in the 2012 election in Providence used the single party/master lever option.

Do we have any reason to think the rest of the state’s voters used the master lever any differently? I don’t know, but one thing we do know is that more people vote in presidential elections and we see that the usage of master lever in the presidential election doubled as a percentage. About half the ballots cast simply used the master lever. So what does that do to down-ballot races? What does that mean in non-partisan races? Disenfranchisement. Do most voters know the master lever will not cast a vote in a non-partisan race? Probably not as evidenced by the number of ballots that have the single party line connected and no votes in non-partisan races.

What we saw here was a jump in ballots cast and a huge jump, more than a doubling of the number of single party votes cast. This tells us a lot about the voter who only participates in presidential election years. This is from a statistical, big picture view, not indicative of any single voter. We saw voters who wanted to come in, cast their ballot for the party of choice for president and move on. We see that many of these people don’t vote in mid-term elections. We can tell because of the jump in single party votes. This sea of voters affects the downballot races and the integrity of elections.

In spite of what some may believe, I’m not someone who thinks it’s going to be a panacea or immediately fix the one-party rule in RI. I think it will have an effect but it will be tiny. Not even really noticeable to many. But what if it does change the result of one campaign every few years? Is it worth it then? It is worth it to the person who worked hard campaigning and would have gotten elected without its existence. Those will be few and far between, but they do exist.

If you want evidence of the confusion that happens when the master lever is used, look at some of the ballots that were found in the 2010 election in Burrillville. We see ballots where the single party option line was connected and then in nearly a third of those, a line was connected in each race. 29% of those voters didn’t seem to know that they already voted in those races simply by connecting the master lever line. In 34% of those ballots, the partisan Town Council race was undervoted. 28% of the master lever marked ballots didn’t vote for anyone in the non-partisan school committee race. Then there was the most interesting ballot of all, the one where all the lines were connected for the single party option.

Lastly, I’m not going to make excuses for the Rhode Island Republican party or the candidates that run with their affiliation. However after seeing these statistics, if someone was going to run as a non-Democrat, it becomes quite obvious as to when you don’t want to run for office. A presidential election year, as we see that big jump in single party votes. Is that the kind of election system we want to have?