Three Election Reformers Approach the Finish Line: Will Nevada Adopt the Alaska Model?

The Purple Principle

In 2024, Nevada voters will see a ballot Question 3 strikingly similar to the question on Final Five voting that passed by 6 points back in 2022. That’s because a constitutional amendment must be passed by voters twice in succession, according to Nevada law.

And should voters approve Question 3 again this year, Nevada will become the second state (after Alaska) to implement this ambitious electoral voting reform system including a unified open primary and ranked choice general election.

“After we won,” recalls Cesar Marquez of Nevada’s first passage of Final Five Voting in 2022, “Sondra, Doug, and I and so many others, we felt, okay, we now have two years to talk about ranked choice voting.”

A former Tesla Engineer, Marquez is referring to his colleagues Doug Goodman of Nevadans for Election Reform and Dr. Sondra Cosgrove of Vote Nevada.

In this episode

We learn how Goodman, a retired military veteran, began working on election reform in the Silver State a decade ago. Initially, Goodman lobbied extensively for legislative action before pivoting to the ballot initiative process. He recalls:

“One of the questions I was posing to business leaders at the time was, if you had a more open electoral system, could that be a tiebreaker if a company was considering moving to Nevada?”

Sonda Cosgrove, a history professor at Southern Nevada College, soon joined Goodman in that effort. She had noticed an alarming and counterintuitive trend in her efforts at Vote Nevada. Yes, more voters were registering to vote. But they were not voting in larger numbers.

“And so we started realizing that they were being turned off right at the get-go in the primary,” says Cosgrove.” That's when.. .they were just kind of opting out.”

Marquez joined forces with Goodman and Cosgrove to place Final Five Voting on that 2022 ballot. But he came at political reform from a very different direction.

“The first thing I'll say is that I never liked politics, I still don't like politics,” admits Marquez. “ My background is in engineering, and I've worked in manufacturing for my whole career.”

What do a military veteran, academic historian and engineer turned reformer have in common?

Is ranked choice voting best demonstrated by a “rank the drink” event in English or “rank the taco” evening in Spanish?

The Purple Principles discusses these and other election reform questions in this latest episode of our season-long state election reform series. We began in Idaho then traveled to Washington DC, Alaska, South Dakota and Arizona, before landing here in Nevada.

The Purple Principle is a Fluent Knowledge production. Original music by Ryan Adair Rooney.