Powered by Native Voters, Ranked-Choice Voting and Open Primaries Survive in Alaska
Powered by Native Voters, Ranked-Choice Voting and Open Primaries Survive in Alaska
Alaska’s predominantly Native regions delivered huge margins against repealing the state’s new elections system, despite facing continued logistical challenges to voting.
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Why not simply ranked choice voting? why the open primary?
Partisan primaries tend to produce more extreme candidates. The hope is switching to a combined primary will result in moving candidates of more general appeal on to the general election.
I understand that. My question was: why is a primary needed in the first place? It makes sense with first past the post, but with ranked choice voting and instant runnoff, I don't get why. Does the US constitution require state to organise primaries?
Primaries can have so many candidates the median voter is never going to learn about all of them. A primary is a reasonable way to down-select to a candidate pool where they all have a chance to make their case to voters without being seen as noise.