Colorado Republican Party sues Secretary of State to block nearly 2 million Coloradans from voting in primary elections

www.cbsnews.com

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As was established in 2016, https://observer.com/2017/08/court-admits-dnc-and-debbie-wasserman-schulz-rigged-primaries-against-sanders/
DNC/RNC Primary's are private affairs that have nothing to do with the right to vote. They only exist to support the "legitimacy" of the parties of Capital. If the parties wanted to, they could unilateral choose their candidates with zero outside/public input. In fact they basically do.
- This is literally why no one can vote as Independents. Closed Primaries should be illegal.
  
  Yeah, I kind of agree here. I think we should have a "playoff" system where candidates could pick a party for advertising purposes, but otherwise compete on an open playing field with all other candidates.
  Here's how I'd like it to work:
  ban all political ads, outside of informing when the next debate or rally will happen
  all debates are funded with tax-payer dollars
  for House seats, vote by party for the general election, and Reps would be elected proportionally and based on primary votes
  Senate seats work as they currently do, except for the voting system change below
  all votes are some kind of IRV system, e.g. ranked choice, approval, etc
  there would be a vote after each primary debate (should have 3-5 of those), and if you don't participate, your previous votes carry forward through the primary process; candidates are eliminated if they go under some threshold; you could straight-ticket this, but it would weight all candidates from your party equally
  This probably needs to be refined, but I think the general approach is worth discussing.
  
  Independent is a party, you probably mean unafilliated, but in CO, unafilliated voters are able to vote in either R or D primaries, though not both.
- Wasn't sure if'n it was official, but knew they were doing that, at least where they can.
- See, this is the main reason why we need to ditch primaries altogether.
  But to do that, we need to change the voting system to one that can actually handle multiple candidates. STAR is, hands down, the single best system for this. A good runner-up would be Approval or maybe Score.
  I would strongly recommend against any other system. Especially RCV.
  
  RCV still beats FPTP
  
  I like the idea of primaries, if only to narrow the field a bit. I posted above my proposal, but in general it's:
  one large primary for all candidates, regardless of party
  regular, tax-payer funded debates, with a vote after each one (say, 3-5 times during a primary cycle); your vote carries from one vote to the next unless you submit a new ballot
  use some IRV system (I'm not opposed to RCV like you are, but I do prefer STAR or Approval voting)
  use proportional representation by party for House seats, since-candidate for all other seats (Senate, President, governor, etc)
  ban political ads, or at least require them to be independently fact-checked
  IMO, the problem isn't with the way we count votes, but with the whole structure of our electoral process. The current system is designed to end up with a two-party system, which means most of the country is poorly represented. We should change the system until we have a healthy mix of parties with no one party having a majority in both houses of Congress and the executive branch.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
If it succeeds, and state law is overturned, 1.7 million Coloradans wouldn't have a say in either Democratic or Republican primary elections.
The ballot measure gave unaffiliated voters the right to vote in either the Democratic or Republican primary.
He's also trying to amend party bylaws to make it easier for the GOP to opt out of the open primary altogether.
Wadhams says the amendment essentially steals the votes of members who don't show-up.
Wadhams says former president Donald Trump is the reason Republicans have lost and if the party dies, he says, conservatives aren't the only ones who lose.
We've tried the open primary for three cycles now and Republicans have lost more ground with each successive election," Williams said.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
So…. Are the Republicans in Colorado trying to ensure a Democratic Party victory?
As an unaffiliated voter, open primaries don’t make much sense. The parties pick who should represent them in the general election, if I wanted to say who should represent them I should join the party. Part of being unaffiliated is opting out of that process.
- The problem is that most states lean toward one party, so it encourages moderates to just join the majority party so they can pick the frontrunner. That then results in a positive feedback loop where states tend to get more and more extreme in whichever direction has a slight lead.
  Instead of that, we should have open primaries where you can vote for multiple candidates for the same position. I am registered Libertarian, but I rarely actually vote libertarian and instead pick whichever candidate I think will do the best among those that have a real shot at winning. Instead of that, I'd much rather vote for multiple candidates (the libertarian included) that I think would represent my interests. So I'm interested in voting for candidates from all parties, because some candidates from each major party are acceptable to me, while others are not.
  That's why I want an open primary process, ideally with all candidates competing for a handful of slots. If a state leans Democrat and there are 5 candidate slots per seat, I'd expect 2-3 to be Democrat, 1-2 to be Republican, and 0-1 to be some third party. Likewise for a Republican-leaning state, but the opposite direction. Instead, we end up with two extreme candidates, one from each major party, and 1-3 third party candidates that don't get any real shot at winning (why would you throw your vote away?).
  
  I have lived in one state that had open primaries. A voter still had to choose which primary to vote in that day. Some independent voters will choose to vote in the R primary and some in the D primary but you still have the problem of moderates largely joining the party primary with the most influence in their area.

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