Last weekend, I had the pleasure of reading through the Mail Ballot Supplement Ballot Questions. There will be three questions coming up on the ballot, each suggesting a change to the Nevada Constitution.
The first two questions deal with topics that are already covered under State Law, so that a Constitutional Amendment is unnecessary at best. However, Question 3 is exciting! It’s something I’ve been wanting for years.
Question 3 comes in two parts. The first part is to open primaries. I know that many local voters were disappointed or even irritated that they had such limited participation in the primaries, just because they weren’t affiliated with one of the two major political parties. Open primaries would let everyone have a say in who the options for Governor (and other state positions) would be, come November.
Yes, this could weaken political parties. It’s been argued that open primaries could result in some party not being included at all on the November ballot. But if that happens, it shows that that party’s candidates had so little voter support that they wouldn’t have ended up winning that region anyway.
The second part to Question 3 offers Ranked-Choice Voting, and it’s the part that got me excited. Some of our recent elections have had people unhappily voting for “the lesser of two evils.” Because if they were to vote for someone they didn’t consider evil, the worse evil would win.
In ranked-choice voting, a person can vote for the non-evil candidate, and for the lesser-of-two-evils. If their first-choice candidate is losing, their vote is instead counted toward their second choice.
Instituting Ranked-Choice Voting and opening the primaries would lessen the political division we’ve been experiencing. It would give more voice to moderates and nonpartisans both by letting them vote on more candidates and by making it safer to vote for the candidates they actually want without feeling they’re wasting their vote.
Anyone who’s less than enthusiastic about the current state of the dominant political parties should be glad to have this question on the ballot.
-Abbie Brill
Overton
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1 thought on “LETTER: Excited about Question 3”
Open primaries are a bad idea. The purpose of the primary process is for each party to select their best, who will then run against the other party opponents in the general election.
California implemented an “open primary” process, now Republicans can barely win elections for dog catcher in the state. The state has also been suffering from the bad policies of their elected Democrat officials.
Wyoming has an open primary process. Instead of trying to win over her base, Liz Cheney asked Democrats in the state to vote in the GOP Primary for her because she had alienated her own voter base. That kind of behavior is unethical and has no place in our Constitutional Republic. Why would any party want to allow unethical partisans from the other party manipulating their primary process?
We often hear about “term limits for Congress”. Well, the primary processes are the term limits, forced onto politicians by We the People. We cannot properly force term limits or enable our representatives to continue to serve us faithfully when our primaries are corrupted by other parties.
Independents like to claim that they get left out of the primary process. That’s like saying if you don’t register to vote, you’re left out of the voting process. If you want to vote for candidates in a primary, it’s very simple, register with the party that has candidates most closely aligned with your ideology, and then vote for them in the primary. If the other party nominates someone you think is a better candidate than your party’s nomination, then you can vote for them instead.
With their homeless problem, lack of energy production, war on private transportation, etc., we don’t need to import any more Marxist policies from Calirfornia. Sisolak has already shown us how bad a California style governor can be for our state. Let’s not make that same mistake with embracing more California style policies.
All three ballot questions this year are bad ideas and will continue the degradation of the principles our Constitutional Republic was founded on.
If you want to be like California, you can move there and enjoy all the “blessings” they entail. Leave the Great State of Nevada what it is, a Great state. Vote no on #3.