In 2024 Alaska Democrats were understandably incensed when Eric Hafner, a convict who had never lived in their state, ran for Alaska's US House seat as a Democrat. State and federal law allowed Hafner to seek the office, and state law let him register with the party he preferred.

The state Democratic Party, for its part, could do nothing. It had no way to disavow him or indicate on the ballot its endorsement of incumbent Representative Mary Peltola. Come election day, Hafner got more than 3,500 first-choice votes from Alaskans who saw his name and party on the ballot but presumably had no idea that if elected, he would represent them from a New York prison where he was serving 20 years.

Two years earlier, the state Republican Party was the one fuming. Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III, registered Republicans, both on the top-four general election ballot, were feuding on the campaign trail, refusing to cross-endorse each other as co-partisans typically do in ranked choice elections. The state GOP endorsed Begich early and never endorsed Palin. In the general election, Palin and Begich split Republican votes, as expected, pushing the election to Mary Peltola, who became the first Democrat in the seat in 49 years. (Two years later, with Palin out of the picture and New York prisoner Hafner siphoning off Democratic votes from Peltola, Begich reclaimed the post for the GOP.)

Now both Republicans and Democrats in Alaska have a beef with a minor flaw in their state's ballot rules that lets candidates claim a party but doesn't let parties claim candidates. The same flaw fusses California and Washington, the two other states that use unified all-candidate primaries.

In short, any candidate in these three states can claim any party, potentially confusing voters as to who really represents their values. And political parties can do nothing to stop them.

The fix to this problem in all three states is easy: let parties indicate their endorsement of a candidate with two words: "[Democratic or Republican] Nominee."

North Americans hate political parties (often including their own), and anti-party sentiment has been prevalent since the Progressive movement more than a hundred years ago. But political scientists concur that for all their disrepute, political parties are the essential intermediaries of democracies everywhere. They aggregate like-minded voters, assemble coalitions that can win, mediate disputes among coalition factions, articulate visions and platforms, and serve as shorthand identifiers on the ballot for time-strapped voters. Indeed, party identification is so valuable that in its absence, many voters lean on unreliable markers such as gender or surname to try to guess which right candidate is right for them.

Giving parties space to claim their nominees on ballots in Alaska, California, or Washington would not change the states' election system in fundamental ways, but it would provide voters with more reliable information.

Research by political scientist Cheryl Boudreau and her colleagues at the University of California, Davis, shows that informing voters of candidates' party endorsements helps them correctly identify candidates whom they agree with. In an experiment with voters in a nonpartisan mayoral election in which political parties had made endorsements, informing voters of candidates' party endorsements let voters find their best-matched candidate 59 percent of the time, compared to 53 percent of the time when they don't know the parties' endorsements. And that improvement came not with putting the party labels on the ballot but with a mailing sent to voters. A six-point gain in voters' alignment is modest, but in close races it could be decisive.

Alaska already sends more information to voters than most states do. The state's Division of Elections prints and mails official voters' guides to all. These guides feature candidates' statements and often include the endorsements they have won from party organizations and w...