I knew that the June 5 elections wouldn’t produce the same excitement, but I headed to the polls in the early evening with anticipation. Voter participation in my diverse precinct–mostly white and Asian families, with some Russians and a sprinkling of African Americans and Latinos–is usually a pretty good bellwether for turnout in the broader electorate not only for San Francisco but also for California. And the 2012 primary and state races would be the first test of the Golden State’s new method of elections.

Call it California Politics 2.0. In recent years, political reformers convinced voters to pass two major reforms–the first an independent redistricting commission, the second a “top-two” primary in which all the candidates, regardless of party affiliation, run in a free-for-all June race to pick the top two candidates for a November runoff. In this month’s elections, the fruits of these reforms–new districts and a new primary system–debuted.

So at around 7:40 p.m., as I approached my polling place–a neighbor’s garage with voting booths mounted alongside children’s bicycles and gardening tools–I was excited to witness a little bit of history.

Instead, I saw almost nothing.

There was no line at all. The poll workers looked beyond bored. I asked them if it had been like this all day, and they nodded and pointed me to the red electronic counter on San Francisco’s optical scan voting equipment. Those glaring digits show the number of clicks, triggered each time a ballot card is fed into the machine. In most elections, my precinct has about 500 voters by the end of the day. But on this day the number read 159. And since San Francisco had two ballot cards per voter this election, that meant that only about 80 voters had voted. Polls had opened at 7:00 a.m., and a poll worker did the math for me: “That’s about six voters per hour.”

Voter turnout in San Francisco ended up at around 30 percent. That was the lowest turnout in a presidential primary in the city’s history–and still it was higher than the record-low turnout across the rest of the Golden State.

My neighbor’s mostly empty garage proved to be only one indicator that the new reforms weren’t working.

Turnout in elections is the product of competition and a sense that voters have choice. Well-meaning reformers had sold the top-two primary and newly drawn districts as tools that would create competition and choice, as well as elect more moderates and decrease legislative polarization.

None of that came to pass this election. The vast majority of the races in California, whether for federal or state elections, showed zero difference from the old system: no competition at all. But perhaps even worse were the handful of seats that weren’t snooze fests; in those races the top-two primaries created perverse results that ran contrary to the choices of voters.

In U.S. House District 31, a liberal-leaning district around San Bernardino where 49 percent of residents are Latino and less than 30 percent white, two white Republican candidates finished in the top two with low vote percentages. The problem was that the Democrats ran too many candidates–four Democrats split the liberal vote against only two GOP candidates. The lead Democrat missed the runoff by only 1,500 votes.

In California’s 51st U.S. House district in San Diego, a strongly Democrat district, the lead candidate–a current Democratic state senator–spent nearly $50,000 in support of a penniless Republican opponent to prevent his strongest rival, a fellow Democrat, from making the November election. The ruse worked, and now the Democrat will soundly trounce his Republican opponent in the runoff.

These are just a couple of the manipulations and strategies that were deployed to game the top-two primary. In a number of these races, if fewer candidates had run the results would have been different. It’s a roll of the dice to see who survives what might be more accurately called the crapshoot primary. In future elections, political party leaders will quickly figure this out and begin discouraging candidates from running to avoid splitting their parties’ vote. Political machines will gain even more influence.

The new system also diminishes choice. In some of these races, the crapshoot primary resulted in two candidates from the same party finishing one-two and facing each other in a November runoff. In those races–28 of the 153 seats at federal and state levels–the narrow choice for voters will be to pick which flavor of Democrat or Republican to elect. Minor parties, long an integral part of California’s political tradition, have been completely wiped off the November ballot.

Even in the face of these peculiar results, advocates of the crapshoot primary have mounted a media campaign to defend it. On June 7, Dan Schnur of USC’s Jesse Unruh Institute claimed in the Los Angeles Times that two candidates from the same party running against each other in the November runoff will “push candidates to the middle” where they can attract voters “from the other party as well as their own.”

If he’s right, that’s little more than a formula for political mush. But it’s more likely that the top two won’t change how a legislator acts in office–because most of these same-party runoffs fall in safe seat districts. Sure, Congressman Howard Berman, a Democrat, is angling for the GOP vote in his San Fernando Valley district to beat his November opponent, Congressman Brad Sherman, also a Democrat. But is a victorious Berman really going to change his spots once in office? Hardly, since he wants to be re-elected in his heavily Democratic district.

So what would change our politics–and draw voters to the polls? California needs to adopt reforms that have a record of success in other states and countries. Proportional representation would result in true multiparty democracy and representation across the spectrum, including moderates. Ranked choice voting, which gives voters a first, second, and third ranking, would prevent the weird vote-splits created by the crapshoot primary and create incentives for broad coalitions. Public financing and free media time for campaigns would help counteract the boost that big donors received after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.

After leaving my polling place on election night, I made the rounds of various campaign gatherings. Most of the politicos and insiders were relieved that nothing unexpected had happened. Indeed, in the Bay Area, Democratic incumbents such as Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Lee, Mark Leno, and Tom Ammiano all finished so far ahead of the competition that there’s no doubt about who will win in November. While many of those expressing satisfaction with the results were friends of mine, they also were party apparatchiks with little interest in reforming the system. The fact that they were happy was not a good sign.

Indeed their happiness–and June’s historically low voter turnout–should be a wake-up call. It’s time for Californians to get serious about political reform.

Steven Hill is the former director of the political reform program at the New America Foundation and author of 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy: 2012 Election Edition and Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age.

*Photo courtesy of Steve Rhodes.

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The sculptures, of which there are 192, depict more than 600 human figures, all life-size or larger and expertly rendered in bronze or granite. They are named after their creator, Gustav Vigeland, a sculptor who lived from 1869 to 1943. His monumental work took nearly four decades to complete–from 1907 to 1942.

All of the figures are naked, not a stitch of clothing on any of them. Yet the display isn’t lurid in the least. The females are sturdy and solid, the males robust but tender, genitalia unabashedly exposed. They frequently appear in allegorical groups: as adolescents in a game of leapfrog, or as a mother and father with their child, or as two lovers in a state of bliss, foreheads touching tenderly, or as two lovers in a state of conflict. One of the most famous sculptures is of a toddler throwing a rageful tantrum, face scrunched up in his lilliputian fury. All phases of life are represented–infancy, adolescence, adulthood. Even a fetus and a decomposing skeleton make an appearance.

The Vigeland sculptures are the apotheosis of a distinctly Scandinavian sensibility, one in which art is prized and the unclothed body is seen as a celebration of health, not of license. In Oslo, nearly every park, street corner, and house seems to be studded with sculptures, many of them nude figures, old and new, traditional and modern.

This esteem for the human body shorn of pretense can surprise the visitor. Once after I had landed at Oslo’s Gardermoen airport, I saw a magazine stand adorned with the front page of a major daily newspaper showing a huge color photo of ten bust-baring, smiling ladies. What’s this, I thought? The Norwegian version of Rupert Murdoch’s page-three cheesecake photo? No, as I looked closer I saw that most of these women were at least sixty years old. Each was missing one of her breasts. They were survivors sharing their stories during a week of breast-cancer awareness. They smiled into the camera unashamedly, fearlessly.

The Vigeland sculptures not only celebrate a particular idiom of la dolce vita, the same spirit that takes pleasure in all things organic and unadorned–whether it’s food or the human body. They also pay tribute to community and togetherness. Some of the figures are arrayed around a large, grand fountain, and others line up evenly on either side of a long bridge. Still others are scaling a giant granite obelisk jutting into the sky. They writhe, but, unlike those in Rodin’s Gates of Hell, with purpose, not despair. There is a sense of unity, of the figures carefully supporting one another as they make their way toward some kind of salvation at the summit, which is occupied by sculptures of children stretching toward the sky.

I walked among these hundreds of figures as if through a forest, overwhelmed and awed. Vigeland’s artistic achievement is on the scale of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel or Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia, although hardly as recognized.

That Vigeland died in the dark years of Nazi occupation, when the cult of death ruled, heightens the power and poignancy of his achievement. Today, as Oslo recovers from the rampage of mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, Vigeland’s creation stands in defiance of all that the killers of this world represent. A life-affirming thread–you might even say a cult of life–runs through the entire mise-en-scène like a sturdy vine.

Norwegians take great pride in the Vigeland sculptures. When I was trying without much luck to make conversation with one taciturn taxi driver, an older Norwegian with white-streaked hair and square aviator eyeglasses, his face lit up when I praised the Vigeland sculptures. “Thank you,” he said with a wide smile, bowing slightly as if thanking me on behalf of his country. I was, once again, moved.

Steven Hill is the author, most recently, of Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way Is the Best Hope for an Insecure Age.

*Photo courtesy of naustvik.

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