Nevada voting is residents’ alternative

Brian Ramos

Southern Nevada residents solid their ballots Tuesday morning on the Desert Breeze Group Heart throughout the June 11 Main Election in Las Vegas, Nevada on Tuesday, June 11, 2024.

By Sondra Cosgrove, Las Vegas

Friday, July 12, 2024 | 2 a.m.

I strongly object to Sam Oliker-Friedland’s July 6 column, “Don’t knock down democracy with out blueprints to repair it,” opposing ranked-choice voting.

Based on Affect Watch, Oliker-Friedland leads an outdoor assume tank funded by darkish cash organizations, with no Nevadans on its board. So, why is that this outsider making an attempt to affect Nevada voters?

Oliker-Friedland argues that open primaries with ranked-choice voting would have negatively affected previous elections. As a historical past professor, I might by no means settle for such reasoning from a pupil. You’ll be able to’t re-engineer the previous with hypothetical variables.

We’re to imagine that ranked-choice voting is an unproven, newfangled experiment when efforts to undertake open primaries and ranked-choice began in Nevada with a invoice in 2015. Actually, Alaska used open primaries with ranked-choice voting in its 2022 election with exemplary outcomes, together with electing the state’s first Indigenous girl to Congress and an independent-minded senator.

We’re informed that ranked-choice voting would disenfranchise voters, particularly voters of coloration, as a result of it’s complicated. I’m bored with elitists calling Nevada voters dumb. Please cease insulting us.

If Oliker-Friedland is nervous about voter disenfranchisement, he ought to fear concerning the 1000’s of mail-in ballots that go uncounted every election resulting from poor voter schooling for mail-in voting. Or concerning the 40% of voters who pay for our elections but are prohibited from voting in closed-primary races.

Let Nevadans focus on managing democracy in our state with out outsider, elitist interference.