One of the things I have always appreciated about American elections is that the results are always fascinating — a glimpse into our communal likes, dislikes, and moods. Sometimes, though, they’re also perplexing, a reason to step back and wonder why the results turned out as they did. That’s where I found myself after this year’s general elections — not so much because of who got elected, but because of how voters decided to approach the electoral process itself.

Year after year, Americans tell pollsters that they don’t like partisanship and, overall, prefer candidates who are moderate rather than extreme. These characteristics have been harder to find in recent decades, for any number of reasons. Districts drawn every 10 years to pack Republicans into some districts and Democrats into others produce nominees who tend toward the extremes. Winner-take-all primaries tend to attract the most motivated voters. Head-to-head matchups in the general election give voters a binary choice that often doesn’t meet their desires.

As it happens, there were a raft of ballot initiatives this year that offered voters a chance to address some of these issues, especially by re-jiggering the system to make it more likely that candidates would have to appeal to voters beyond their base. And in state after state, they went down to defeat.

It wasn’t universal. Bucking the trend, for instance, a few cities — including Washington, D.C. and Bloomington, Minnesota — decided to try ranked-choice voting, in which voters rank their candidates from most to least favorite. But at the state level — in Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, Nevada, and Oregon — voters said they weren’t interested. The one state-level exception was Alaska, which has had ranked-choice voting since 2022; the system survived an attempt to repeal it by just a few hundred votes, with its support in Native Alaskan communities making all the difference. Similarly, efforts to install open primaries, in which the top vote-getters would advance to the general election regardless of party, also went down to defeat in state after state.

In Ohio, where an anti-gerrymandering initiative was on the ballot in the form of a proposal to create a citizen-led redistricting committee rather than leave the process to legislators, some 53 percent of voters cast their ballots opposing it. To be sure, reform advocates charged both before and after the election that the description of the initiative adopted by the state’s Ballot Board was confusing, and that some voters who thought they were voting for a commission mistakenly wound up voting against it.

But for the most part, the failure of election-reform efforts this year can’t be laid at the feet of poor wording. Instead, they fell victim both to this year’s highly charged political climate and to strong opposition from the Republican and Democratic parties, which had no interest in seeing their power watered down. “I think these initiatives were largely swept up in a highly polarized climate in which any suggestions of changing voter rules were met with suspicion among voters,” the leader of one national reform group told NPR right after the election. “And then that’s amplified by the fact that you have both political parties and their aligned special interests fighting tooth and nail against these initiatives and planting doubt among voters.”

Changes to the electoral system are hard to sell. Even in the best of times, the mechanics of ranked-choice voting are difficult to explain; and while open primaries might be embraced by independents and other non-affiliated voters, party faithful are more likely to look at them with suspicion.

Still, many voters are tired of the extreme partisanship and legislating-from-the-margins they’ve witnessed over the last decade and more. Making changes to the electoral process in ways that would strengthen the political middle is a legitimate way to approach the problem. But it’s clear that before that can happen, reformers will have to clarify the benefits — and find a way to reassure voters they’re not trying to throw the advantage to one party or the other.          

Lee Hamilton, 93, is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years (1965-1999), representing a district in south-central Indiana.