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Both the pro and con speakers Monday seemed to agree Nevada’s Question 3 presents two issues to voters.
The ballot question was discussed at the League of Women Voters forum in the Brewery Arts Center.
The first issue was the portion of the question that would open primaries to all registered voters, not just those registered with the party holding the primary.
Sondra Cosgrove, a professor at the College of Southern Nevada, said the current closed primary system effectively disenfranchises some 700,000 Nevada voters who can only vote a limited ballot in the primary because they aren’t registered Republican or Democrat. Question 3 would open those primaries up so all voters could vote in them.
But Marcos Lopez of the Nevada Policy Research Institute said the second part of the question that institutes a ranked choice voting system will confuse voters and increase distrust in the elections. Ranked choice allows a voter to pick his or her top choice, but then add up to four more candidates in order of his or her preference.
If a candidate gets more than 50 percent, he or she is elected.
But if not, the candidate receiving the least amount of support is eliminated and the process is repeated until one candidate emerges victorious.
“I think ranked choice will increase distrust,” Lopez said. He said the premise behind the system is that it’s extremism in the primaries that’s causing extremism in politics, an idea he rejected.
Cosgrove pointed out that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t say some one has to be a member of a certain party to vote. Right now, she said, the major parties have, “a monopoly on our political system.” She said Question 3 is designed to end that and force the major parties to compete for voters who currently feel disenfranchised.
Lopez said supporters of this proposal tend to be members of political groups that don’t normally get their way.
He urged people not to “make a mistake that will take two election cycles to undo.” That is a reference to the fact once something is in Nevada’s constitution, it requires two votes of the people to remove it, which he said other jurisdictions that initially supported ranked choice have had to do.
But Cosgrove said the idea behind Question 3 is to, “get more people engaged in the primary process, which opening the primary system would do. Ranked choice, she argued would enable more than just the two top vote-getters to move forward to the general election.