Vote Nevada Supporters,

The CCSD Trustees meeting to possibly reconsider Superintendent Jara’s termination is tomorrow, November 18, at 5:00 pm.  You can view the meeting agenda here: https://ccsd.net/trustees/meeting-agendas/2021 and you can watch the meeting live-streamed here: https://ccsd.eduvision.tv/watchlive.aspx?q=SLswNIYl6UQ%253d

Saturday is the Native American Holiday Market at the CSN West Charleston Campus.  The event is from 9 to 5 in the Student Union Auditorium.  Please come out to support our indigenous community members.

Address: 6375 West Charleston, LV NV 89146

Here is a campus map: https://www.csn.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2019charlestonmap.pdf

Today, the Nevada Independent reported that a group filed an open primary with ranked-choice voting ballot question for this election cycle.  It is a constitutional amendment because our constitution allows a candidate to win with a plurality, so that needs to be amended to allow for ranked-choice voting.  Here is the article: https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/proposed-ballot-question-would-create-open-primaries-ranked-choice-voting

For reference, we covered open primary systems this summer during our civics festival.  Doug Goodman, who has been working on ranked-choice voting since 2013, did a presentation for us.  Here is Doug’s website with lots of good voter registration statistics: https://nevadansforelectionreform.org/

You can watch his presentation, which explains ranked-choice voting (it is not difficult).  

This is the recording of Doug Goodman’s presentation on primary election reform: https://vote-nevada.news/Goodman-Open-Primary-RCV

This is a copy of Doug Goodman’s PowerPoint presentation on primary election reform: Goodman Open Primaries

For further reference, according to current Nevada law, any eligible Nevadan can run for any office as a nonpartisan candidate and their name will automatically go onto the general election ballot. So, right now we could have unlimited numbers of nonpartisan candidates on the general election ballot for each race and under the plurality rule, which means someone could win with less than 50 percent of the votes.

You can read the Independent Candidate Guide here: https://www.nvsos.gov/sos/home/showpublisheddocument?id=9605

Moving to a top 5 system is not that different from what we already have; and, opening the primary will ensure our growing number of nonpartisan and independent voters will not be shut out of our taxpayer-financed election process. 

As you can tell, I would support this ballot question. Closed primaries force candidates to only speak to their party’s base voters during the primary and then to “pivot” to speak to everyone else in the general election.  This creates extremism in the primary and it makes the candidates seem untruthful to young voters.  My students ask me how to know when a candidate is being truthful when their messaging changes so drastically.

Thank you for being Nevadans with me,

Sondra