A Change To The Oklahoma Primary

(Originally posted in my Blog Oklahoma Newsletter) 

It’s that time again—time to go vote. Oklahoma has a primary election on Tuesday, June 18, 2024, for federal, state, and county offices. The polls will be open from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm.

As a registered Democrat, I get to sit out this primary. In fact, not very many Democrats ran this year, but I’ll leave that as an issue for another time. I would like to see some changes in Oklahoma’s primary system—not because of my particular political party but for everyone, so more people can have a chance to vote.

I’m not even going to suggest anything radical, like implementing rank-choice voting. Just someone mentioning that caused a Republican panic in the legislature, and they’ve already banned it.

I think we should have open primaries and let anyone vote for any party they want to. That simple.

My case in point: I can’t vote for county sheriff. It’s a Republican primary, and the winner will become sheriff. No other party ran for the office. So, anyone not a registered Republican has no say at all in who our sheriff is. Is that democratic? Is it even fair? Oh, I want to point out that I’ve nothing against either candidate running for sheriff; I would love to vote for one of them. I’m using this as an example. I could say the same for the 3rd congressional district; it’s a single-party race.

If we can’t open the primaries, I would love to see single-party races moved to the general ballot.

That’s my thoughts on changes to Oklahoma’s primaries. What are yours? Please leave a comment.

More later. Time to think on other things.