White Papers on Election Methods

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


Executive Summary

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: