I’m not 100% sure, but I’m pretty confident that tomorrow will be the first party primary I’ve voted in.

n.b. – I’m specifically referring to party primaries. I’ve voted in local elections that are held at the same time as party primaries, and whose infrastructure party primaries ride on (I’ve always assumed that the states subsidize this aspect of the GOP and Democratic Party, but I realized earlier that I’ve never verified this).

When subjected to any amount of inspection, a system that privileges two parties ins general elections and effectively locks out independents and third-party candidates is inherently anti-democratic.

Also, a system that presents a general election as a showdown between two parties leads to least-worst voting in elections (“which candidate don’t I find reprehensible?”) instead of choosing between two or more candidates that most of the voters in an area have supported.

I’m a huge fan of open primaries, and also ranked voting. You may have heard some discussion about open primaries in California, where Democrats are worried that having too many candidates in some congressional districts will split their vote and lead to a general election that is just two Republicans.

• 10 Clockwise Party candidates each get 8 primary votes
• 2 Counter-Clockwise Party candidates each get 9 primary votes
• 1 Digital Party candidate gets 2 primary votes
• The general election consists of 2 Counter-Clockwise Party candidates despite the party taking 62 fewer votes than the Clockwise Party, and thus likely not representing the views of most of their constituents

In my opinion, not giving the two parties a bye into the general is a good thing, but a ranked voting system would solve this.

On the back-end, there are many ways ranked voting could work (instant runoffs seem most common but there are other options – see http://www.fairvote.org/); I don’t think there’s a “best” way so much as “all of these options would be better than the two-party least-worst dichotomy.”

The most common criticism seems to be that this would be too complicated for voters on the front-end; given that we’re currently in the middle of March Madness I’ll counter that if you can fill out a tournament bracket, you can handle ranked voting. If you can list your favorite ice cream flavors, or movies, or books, or anything else, you can handle ranked voting.

There are a lot of issues that I feel strongly about, that I think society is going to have to work through slowly.

This isn’t one of those.

This is like changing clocks twice a year, where the only reason not to switch to a system that works better is inertia – except that’s not entirely accurate. The other reason not to change our how our primaries work is that it would weaken the two parties’ stranglehold on the American electoral system, and citizens might get to vote for the candidate we think is best instead of voting against the one who horrifies us.

I can see why the two parties would be against that sort of democracy.