The first of the following two papers proposes improvements to Colorado's primary election system. The key ingredient for solving most of these problems is to use an election method known as approval voting. The second paper is a tutorial on how this solves these problems.
Making Our Primary Votes Count in Colorado
Approval Voting: Solving the Vote-Splitting Problem
Colorado's current primary election system—with its associated pre-primaries (assemblies) and pre-pre-primaries (caucuses)—is broken. Although a few people have learned to exploit this nearly incomprehensible system and will not hear of its abolition, the public may be sufficiently fed up to demand its replacement. Any new system needs to avoid certain technical mistakes in order to be a true improvement.
These two papers propose a real primary election system for Colorado which meets the following requirements:
All voters registered with a party can participate and have equal influence. There is no caucus packing; and there are no assembly delegates to "game the system" and wield 50-100 times the influence of a regular voter.
No "vote splitting," "spoilers" or related problems. (See the paper on "Approval Voting.") Without vote splitting, we can tolerate a larger field of candidates on the ballot; so 1) we don't need assemblies to pre-prune the field and 2) the bar can be set low for prospective candidates who want onto the ballot.
Ballots are trivial and fault-tolerant. Even if you ignore the instructions and simply do something reasonably sensible, your vote will be valid and will be interpreted in a way that does, in fact, make sense.
There is minimal impact on clerks & recorders. Same ballots; same machines; similar if not identical software. (This isn't the complicated "IRV" stuff.)
Caucuses can be retained, if desired, but are re-purposed to serve as "political block parties," "meet-n-greets" or signature-gathering fairs for prospective candidates.
The presidential part of the primary can be either winner-take-all or proportional. The proposal allows for either; and you vote your ballot the same way in either case.