Open primaries would allow anyone to vote in the primaries, regardless of their party registration. The five candidates with the most votes would move on to the general election. Candidates would also be able to register regardless of their political filing.
And then there’s rank choice voting. Rank choice voting, if the proposition is passed, would take place in general elections. This wouldn’t apply to presidential and local elections.
One supporter of the question is Dr. Sondra Cosgrove. She’s the executive director of Vote Nevada and a history professor at the College of Southern Nevada. For Vote Nevada, she focuses on voter education and civic engagement. With rank choice voting, voters can still just vote for one candidate or none of the above, she said.
“Or you can rank up to five and then when the tabulation happens, if a candidate in that race gets 50 percent plus one, they win. The race is over because that person got the majority vote,” she said.
What happens if no candidate gets more than half the vote? The candidate who got picked as voters first choice the least number of times would be eliminated. Those votes would then go to the second choice pick of voters whose first choice was eliminated.
“Then it goes into an instant runoff, so a new election instantly happens. The candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated. What the software does is it says, okay for that candidate, we’re going to look at who voted for them, first choice, and we’re going to see how those voters voted second choice. Your second choice vote allocates up to your second choice candidate,” she said.
This process would continue, going as far through the list of candidates as needed, until a candidate got more than half of the vote, Cosgrove said.
Some voters are feeling some hesitation, like Tony Gonzalez. Gonzalez is 69 and has lived in northern Nevada for about 30 years.
Originally he was for Question 3 and likes that it would open up elections to more diverse candidates, he said. But, he’s thinking about voting against it. Part of the reason he’s changed his mind is because he thinks that there are other issues that should be getting more attention and he does not like some of the funders supporting the proposition, he said.
“Here’s the thing, we have a two party system, you have to take a side. I won’t say that this is a useless thing to do, but definitely it seems we have bigger issues,” he said. “If [rank] choice voting was to get more participation, that’s fine. I think that’s a good thing. I definitely think that we need more participation. But, you know, we also need more educated participation.”
Ron Aryel is a supporter of Question 3, an Independent and has lived in Reno for roughly 16 years. He wants to see a voting system that doesn’t so much favor extreme candidates, he said.
“If you want to get ahead in the primary election, you can’t just be worried about a base, because everybody’s going to be voting: Democrat, Republican, Independent, Green Party, whatever, so you have to try to get as many votes as you can within a larger audience,” he said.
He thinks that open primaries would push political candidates to listen more closely to voters, he said.
“I hope that it’ll produce support for more moderate candidates, for more reasonable candidates.”
Both Aryel and Gonzalez expressed wanting to see more voter participation in elections.
Erica Fretz is a former supporter of Question 3. She supported it in the 2022 general election, but now she’s concerned about the ballot question causing possible confusion in elections, she said. She prefers open primaries but not rank choice voting.
“Let’s open it up to everybody and forget about the ranked choice. Let anybody vote in the primary. To me that seems real simple,” she said. “You’re taking away people’s right to vote by just restricting [voting] to Democrat and Republican. You're taking away the Green Party, the Independents, all those people, you know, and that's where ranked choice voting got me. But then when I started looking into it more, I was like, okay, then I found the wait time, the big money thing, and how long it takes. And it was like, maybe it's not such a hot deal.”
Cosgrove has followed the proposition since its beginning and she supports it. She believes open primaries will create more diversity in elections, she said.
“So as a voter, you would go and vote for one person in the primary, just like you're doing now. Then we calculate the top five vote getters and then those top five candidates move forward. That way, you're able to capture some of the diversity we see in our primary races. And you can divide diversity all kinds of ways, age, gender, ethnicity, ideology. We have lots of that in the primaries, but rarely do we have that in the general election,” she said.
She also hears young voters wanting to have more representation in elections, she said.
“We also want to make sure that the attention that we see, kind of candidates who are new candidates, that maybe have new ideas in the primary, that we don't lose that in the general election,” she said. “Because again, I hear from voters, especially young voters, ‘I got really excited by this candidate. They were a newcomer. They were younger,’ and then they lost in the primary. So now it's just the two old white dudes again. So what do I care?”
This will be the second time Question 3 is on Nevada’s ballot. It was first on the ballot in 2022. In order to make this change to Nevada’s constitution, it needs to get the majority of votes twice. If it does pass this election season, it won’t be in place until 2026.