The March 5 election is not really a ‘primary’

My fellow Californians, your government is lying to you. About our elections

The lie isn’t new. It is 14 years old. It’s a bipartisan falsehood — parroted by both political parties and defended by media. The state publishes it in the voter guides and ballots it sends you.

What is this lie?

It’s that the state elections you participate in during the first half of the year — like the March 5 election — are primaries.

“Primaries” are elections in which voters belonging to a particular party select the candidate who will stand for that party in a general election. The truth is California no longer has elections like that for state elected offices or congressional representatives. Fifty-four percent of California voters chose to eliminate such contests in June 2010, by voting to approve Prop 14.

But no one ever eliminated the name “primary.”

Prop 14 was officially the “Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act.” Its proponents used primary because it was a familiar and legally tested term. But it actually replaced the primary with a two-round, “top-two” system.

Under top-two, our spring election is the opposite of a primary. It’s a general election, in which candidates of every party are on the ballot together.

California’s fall election — in which the two top finishers from the “primary” face off — is also mislabeled. We call it a general election. But it’s really a run-off election between the top two candidates from spring.

You might think this is a meaningless matter of nomenclature. But you’d be wrong. The “primary” lie suppresses turnout when it matters most: in the March elections.

Voters usually focus on November, when the whole country goes to the polls. But California voters have more choices in the March election, when their ballots have the widest variety of candidates. March is thus the election voters should prioritize. But they don’t. California’s turnout patterns are the same as before we eliminated primaries. In 2022, only 27% of eligible Californians cast ballots in the spring election, as opposed to 41% in November 2022.

If you’re a California voter and didn’t know this, don’t blame yourself. Election officials, media and candidates still call the first election “the primary,” and treat it as if it’s just a warm-up to November.

That’s hypocrisy. Our state’s leaders rail against misinformation and call themselves defenders of democracy — even as they keep repeating this damaging “primary” misinformation.

For a decade, I’ve been a lonely voice asking our leaders to correct themselves. I’ve suggested alternatives to the “primary” label. I prefer “general” but would accept “first round,” “the main event” or “The Big One.”

I’ve gotten nowhere.

Some people simply don’t see the problem. Others acknowledge the error but say their hands are tied — because state law calls the first round election a “primary,” they must call it that too.

But we shouldn’t give up. This year, let’s resolve to take The Big One seriously. If more Californians show up at the polls in March, we’ll get more representative verdicts on everything from our next U.S. Senator to the mental health policy changes that Prop 1 proposes.