Noah Feldman, Columnist

Tucson's Election System Gets an Undeserved Reprieve

An appeals court upholds a dysfunctional hybrid process for city council races.

September 6, 2016 at 7:10 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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What if you could vote in the general election -- but not the primary? Reversing itself, an appeals court has upheld the Tucson city council’s strange electoral system, which creates exactly this anomaly for some voters. The result is probably legally correct. But the voting system is fairly dysfunctional, and should be changed.

Tucson’s practice, which dates from 1929, isn’t completely unheard of, but it’s genuinely strange. The city is divided into six wards, and there are six city councilors. In any given city council election, three of these officials are up for election.