Law & Principles

Massachusetts rejects top-two primary proposal as Oklahoma fight continues

November 5, 2026

Ray Carter

Activists are trying to put a ballot measure before Oklahoma voters, proposed State Question 836, that would implement a California-style “top two” election system in Oklahoma, eliminating party primaries and allowing general elections to potentially include two candidates from the same party.

Proponents claim the idea is common sense, but voters in other states continue to disagree—most recently in Democrat-dominated Massachusetts, where a similar proposal was rejected by an overwhelming margin this week.

Under the “top two” proposal, all candidates from all parties appear on the same ballot during a spring or summer election. The two candidates with the most votes then advance to the November general election ballot, even if they're from the same party.

Activists succeeded in placing that proposal before Massachusetts voters this fall through Question 3.

It quickly drew opposition from both conservatives and liberals.

The Massachusetts Republican Party announced that it “firmly opposes the All Party State Primary ballot question.”

On a ballot guide posted to social media, the Massachusetts Republican Party warned that Question 3’s “top two” system “destroys competitive elections and denies voters a real choice between contrasting visions in November.”

The Massachusetts Democratic Party also opposed Question 3, as did even the most far-left wing portions of the party.

Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide organization, urged its supporters to oppose Question 3, declaring, “Jungle primaries deny voters real choice. When two candidates of the same party advance to a general election, many voters are denied a substantive choice on Election Day.”

A large coalition opposed Massachusetts Question 3, including many labor union organizations and advocacy groups.

The website for the “No on 3” campaign stated, “Under this system, November elections can come down to two candidates from the same party—and everyone else is locked off the final ballot, including all third party and independent candidates. That is less choice for voters, not more.”

On Nov. 3, Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly rejected the “top two” election system with 61 percent voting “no” on Question 3.

In Oklahoma, the same basic proposal has been advocated by an activist group that launched an initiative petition to place the “top two” proposal on the ballot through proposed State Question 836.

Many backers of SQ 836 have longstanding ties to Democratic candidates and left-wing causes, and one of the major organizations backing the effort is based in New York.

SQ 836 backers needed 172,993 signatures from qualified voters in Oklahoma to place the proposal on the ballot, but the Office of the Secretary of State found that only 142,567 submitted signatures were valid.

Under a state law passed in 2024, petition signers must include at least four specific data points for a signature to be considered valid. Those data points include the voter’s legal first and last name, ZIP code, house number, and numerical month and day of birth.

Officials in the Office of the Secretary of State found that more than 57,000 signatures submitted for SQ 836 did not include at least four of the required basic data points, which are required to prevent fraud and ensure only legal voters are participants.

Backers of SQ 836 sued, asking the Oklahoma Supreme Court to overturn the Secretary of State’s decision and place the question before voters.

The court heard oral arguments in the case on Nov. 2.

Attorney Frederic Dorwart, who represented the pro-SQ 836 plaintiffs, argued that “the test is not whether a signer matched four of five data points. The test is whether the signer was a legal voter.” He also argued that “just the act of signing a petition is, in fact, a burdensome act.”

Attorney Cedric Bond, who represented the Oklahoma Secretary of State, said the state office had simply carried out the legally required process of validating signatures with 80 percent confidence.

Existing law, he said, was enacted to verify the legal status of voters “while minimizing the risk of excluding legal Oklahoma voters.”

“This was done by giving the secretary the responsibility of validating or verifying the signatures by only four of five basic identifiers with those that all legal Oklahoma voters have already provided to the election board,” Bond told the justices. “The statutory requirement is simple: first name, last name, house number, ZIP code, and month and day of birth. And not only is the statutory framework lenient, allowing for a 20 percent margin of error with these basic personal identifiers, but the secretary applied it leniently and graciously here, both before and after the petition signatures were collected.”

Bond also noted that even if the pre-2024 law was applied, which required signatures to match only three data points, SQ 836 would have still failed to qualify, saying the “petition would still fall 6,000 signatures short of the threshold needed.”

No ruling has been issued yet.

If SQ 836 became law, Oklahoma’s election system would largely mirror California elections where voters’ November choices are often limited to two members of the same party and even statewide races have involved only two Democratic candidates.

That scenario would have played out in prior Oklahoma elections had SQ 836 been in place.

In Oklahoma’s 2018 governor’s race, there were 10 candidates who filed to run as Republicans and two who filed to run as Democrats. In the June 2018 primary, 452,606 Oklahomans cast a vote for a Republican gubernatorial candidate compared to just 395,494 votes cast for a Democrat.

But under SQ 836’s California model, Oklahoma’s November ballot that year would have pitted Democratic candidate Drew Edmondson against fellow Democrat Connie Johnson with no Republican option. Because the Republican vote was split 10 ways in the primary, no GOP candidate received more votes than the second-place finisher in the Democratic primary.

Election records show that if the California system had been used for Oklahoma elections, nearly every open-seat gubernatorial race won by a Republican in state history would have instead been a Democrat-versus-Democrat general election.

Numerous Oklahoma conservatives, at both the state and federal level, have come out in strong opposition to SQ 836, including nearly all Republican members of the Oklahoma Legislature.