A New Fight to ‘Undo the Top Two’ Could Reshape California Elections by 2030

SACRAMENTO —

Sixteen years after California voters approved one of the most sweeping changes to the state’s election system in a generation, a Democratic political consultant has filed a ballot measure to undo it — and the timing says as much as the substance.

Steven Maviglio, a longtime Democratic strategist, has filed a proposed constitutional amendment titled “Undo the Top-Two” that would repeal the top-two primary system established by Proposition 14 in 2010. Under the current model, all candidates for a given office appear on a single nonpartisan primary ballot regardless of party, and the top two vote-getters advance to the general election — occasionally producing same-party matchups in the fall. Maviglio’s measure would replace that system with a partisan structure in which each qualified party’s top vote-getter advances to the general election, potentially placing more than two candidates on the November ballot.

The measure surfaced in the middle of an unusually charged primary season. As California mailed ballots for its June 2 gubernatorial primary, early polling raised the once-unthinkable possibility of two Republican candidates advancing to the general election in a state Democrats have dominated for a decade. That scenario, while ultimately avoided, appears to have accelerated interest in revisiting a system that has rarely produced the cross-party moderation its 2010 backers promised.

Proposition 14 passed with roughly 54 percent of the vote in June 2010, backed by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger but opposed by both major parties’ establishments. The pitch was that opening primaries to all voters and all candidates would reward centrist, coalition-building politicians over ideological purists. Fifteen years of election results have not borne that theory out consistently, and Maviglio argues the system has instead produced a form of “undemocratic” outcome: general elections where voters registered with a particular party sometimes have no candidate from that party to choose from at all.

Opponents of the repeal, including veteran election-reform advocates, have criticized the measure in sharper terms, calling it a “shameful” reversion to partisan segregation of the ballot. The Independent Voter Project’s general counsel has noted that the core of the disagreement is not procedural but philosophical — whether primary elections exist to serve party organizations or to serve the broader electorate, a growing share of whom register with no party at all.

The mechanics matter for anyone tracking this from a compliance and governance lens. To qualify, Maviglio’s campaign must collect signatures equal to 8 percent of the votes cast in the 2026 gubernatorial election, and current law requires the measure to appear on a general election ballot — meaning, at earliest, November 2028. If it passes, implementation would fall to the 2030 primary cycle, giving the Legislature roughly two years to build the statutory framework needed to administer a partisan primary system that hasn’t existed in California since before 2012.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office has already flagged the practical cost of that transition: administering a system that could place more than two candidates on general election ballots would require new election infrastructure and voter education, translating into increased costs for state and local governments, with the final price tag dependent on implementation choices the Legislature hasn’t yet made.

None of this changes anything for the 2026 election cycle already underway. But it sets up a multi-year fight over the basic architecture of how Californians choose their representatives — one that will likely draw well-funded opposition from groups that credit the top-two system with reducing partisan gridlock, and well-funded support from party organizations eager to reclaim control over their own nominating process.

Watch the coalitions forming around this measure closely in the months ahead. Party central committees on both sides of the aisle have historically favored a return to partisan primaries because it restores their control over ballot access and candidate endorsements — a form of institutional leverage the top-two system stripped away. Independent voters, who now make up close to a quarter of the state’s registered electorate, stand to lose the most under Maviglio’s proposal, since a partisan primary system typically closes primary ballots to voters not registered with a qualified party. That tension between party control and independent voter access is likely to be the defining fault line of the campaign, regardless of which party ends up funding which side.

The Navarro Report will track signature-gathering progress and any legislative response as the 2028 ballot deadline approaches.

— Jose E. Navarro, The Navarro Report

Human-Directed AI Journalism: Research, analysis, and editorial direction by the author. Drafted in partnership with Claude AI (Anthropic).