Reforming our electoral process will revive conservative principles

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For America to reclaim greatness, we need presidential candidates who are leaders, not jokes. The problem isn’t just the low quality of the candidates — it’s the rigged primary system that keeps handing voters the same “lesser of two evils” choice every election cycle.

Both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are products of this broken system. Trump and President Joe Biden dodged any real primary competition, while Harris became the Democratic nominee without earning a single primary vote. Conservatives now face a grim choice between Harris’s open-border disaster and Trump’s obsessive “stolen election” fantasy.

We see the same thing at the congressional and state levels, with most people wondering how in the world these can be the two choices. The path out of our broken politics isn’t closing our eyes and hoping we nominate better candidates next time — it’s fixing the primary process itself.

I’ve witnessed firsthand the worsening dysfunction in the House of Representatives. Instead of nominating party standard-bearers, our failed primary system elevates fringe candidates who further erode trust in our politics and who have no business representing the public.

Look no further than Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). In 2020, she was chosen to represent Georgia’s 14th Congressional District in an election in which 108,816 people participated — just 21% of all eligible voters in her district. She won 40% of the primary vote, meaning she got elected by 8% of the eligible voters because no Democrat stood a chance in her heavily Republican district.

This problem is just as bad on the Democratic side of the aisle. Just 5% of voters in New York’s 14th Congressional District put Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), founder of the progressive “Squad,” in office. Despite not even representing the wishes of the majority of Democratic primary voters in 2018, her far-left vision has gone from Democratic Socialists of America message boards to the policy platform of the Democratic nominee for president.

But while it’s tempting to focus on politicians’ flaws, the problem is often the election system that put them in office.

Nationwide, just 7% of voters elected 87% of the House in the 2024 primaries. In 15 states, fully closed primaries denied 17.6 million registered independents, who make up the country’s largest voting bloc, the right to vote in those taxpayer-funded elections. The result? Fringe candidates win the day.

The dysfunction caused by these unaccountable candidates hampers Congress’s ability to address challenges we largely agree on, from reining in government spending to securing our border. Solving problems, otherwise known as “legislating,” becomes shorthand for “caving” and creates a primary target for more fringe candidates.

If the GOP is going to return to being worthy of the moniker “the party of Lincoln and Reagan,” we need to reform our electoral process to ensure that the next Republican president is greeted with a conservative majority committed to enacting a conservative agenda, not looking for extra TV airspace.

Fortunately, the founders gave us the tools to fix things, including granting states the power to choose the “time, place, and manner” of their elections. People of all political stripes have exercised that right for the betterment of our democracy, allowing a secret ballot and expanding voting rights to nonlandowners, women, and African Americans. And they did so because they saw bringing the political process closer to the electorate produced a healthier republic. The time to follow in those brave patriots’ footsteps is now.

That change could be coming in November. My home state of Colorado is pursuing an open primary ballot initiative, which would abolish party primaries and replace them with an all-candidate primary. In this system, every candidate, regardless of political party, competes on the same ballot, and any eligible voter can participate. The top candidates with the most votes, regardless of party, advance to the general election.

Open primaries would prevent the Colorado Democratic Party from undermining the integrity of the state’s elections and thwarting the will of the voters. In 2022, it propped up a Libertarian candidate in a competitive House race to take votes away from the Republican candidate. In the end, that “spoiler candidate” got more than 9,000 votes — well above the 1,700 votes by which the Republican lost.

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Colorado Democrats have also repeatedly backed fanatic candidates in GOP primaries in the hopes that they would have an easier matchup in the general election. For a party always talking about “threats to democracy,” it’s absurd that Democrats put money behind erratic, irresponsible candidates who have no business holding any position of public trust. The open primary reforms will hamper their maligned efforts.

I will be voting for open primaries in Colorado. And it is my hope that in doing so, we can once again rally behind strong conservatives who truly represent their constituents.

Ken Buck represented Colorado’s 4th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and House Judiciary Committee.

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Reforming our electoral process will revive conservative principles

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