Southern Nevada residents cast their ballots Tuesday morning at the Desert Breeze Community Center during the June 11 Primary Election in Las Vegas, Nevada on Tuesday, June 11, 2024.
Friday, July 12, 2024 | 2 a.m.
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I strongly object to Sam Oliker-Friedland’s July 6 column, “Don’t knock down democracy without blueprints to fix it,” opposing ranked-choice voting.
According to Influence Watch, Oliker-Friedland leads an outside think tank funded by dark money organizations, with no Nevadans on its board. So, why is this outsider trying to influence Nevada voters?
Oliker-Friedland argues that open primaries with ranked-choice voting would have negatively affected past elections. As a history professor, I would never accept such reasoning from a student. You can’t re-engineer the past with hypothetical variables.
We are to believe that ranked-choice voting is an unproven, newfangled experiment when efforts to adopt open primaries and ranked-choice started in Nevada with a bill in 2015. In fact, Alaska used open primaries with ranked-choice voting in its 2022 election with exemplary results, including electing the state’s first Indigenous woman to Congress and an independent-minded senator.
We are told that ranked-choice voting would disenfranchise voters, especially voters of color, because it’s confusing. I am tired of elitists calling Nevada voters dumb. Please stop insulting us.
If Oliker-Friedland is worried about voter disenfranchisement, he should worry about the thousands of mail-in ballots that go uncounted each election due to deficient voter education for mail-in voting. Or about the 40% of voters who pay for our elections yet are prohibited from voting in closed-primary races.
Let Nevadans discuss managing democracy in our state without outsider, elitist interference.
