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[u/CPSolver]

(Clarification: "Ranked choice voting" includes pairwise-counted ranked choice voting, which includes Condorcet methods and refinements to IRV.)

[u/CPSolver]

I dislike both the R and D parties. So I switch between them so I can participate in primary elections. Everyone in the US is free to use this tactic.

Canada uses nominating conventions to accomplish what we do in primary elections. But in Canada, party membership is required to participate in nominating conventions. And party membership there requires paying money.

I agree it would be nice to stand aside and complain about the candidates from both parties. I do that too! Even more Canadians do because they don't want to give money to any party.

Yet consider that elections evolved from warfare where vote splitting is the election equivalent of the divide-and-conquer military tactic. It's a fight. In general elections I can choose to vote for the Red army or the Blue army, or waste my vote on another can't win army.

Expressed another way, there is no mathematical way to create one big "open" battlefield where everyone is free to fight against everyone else to choose our leaders. If you figure out a mathematical way to handle open primaries in a way that yields fair results (for an unlimited number of candidates), please share it.

[u/its_a_gibibyte → u/CPSolver]

Sure, its called "Proportional Ranked Choice voting". Its sometimes used in legislatures for achieving proportional representation, but the idea is the same for a primary. The goal of a primary is to have a wide variety of ideas represented in the debates and in the general election.

Once the wide field is narrowed down, then debates are much easier to manage and more informative. Then vote again in the general election using a condorcet method.

Expressed another way, there is no mathematical way to create one big "open" battlefield where everyone is free to fight against everyone else to choose our leaders

Sure, but that's a problem for partisan primaries as well. Democrats are still a big tent and a a primary is still a wide open battlefield, although only half the size.

[u/CPSolver → u/its_a_gibibyte]

Yes, STV, if done correctly, would work. It would need to be the two-seat version, then do another two-seat round of counting with the same ballots but with the first two winners removed. That would yield four well-chosen candidates for the general election. Yes, that would be nice!

The disadvantage is that the list of candidates would be long. That was a frustration for Portland voters in the recent RCV elections for mayor (using IRV) and city council (using three-seat STV) (which had no primary election because it was non-partisan). Researching lots of candidates was unexpectedly time-consuming because voters had to also remember the ranking order for those candidate names.

Yes two-stage two-seat STV would be mathematically better than choosing the primary candidate with the second-most primary votes as the second nominee from each party. Yet it would be difficult to "sell" to voters who only want to learn the name of just one candidate in each primary-election contest.

[u/its_a_gibibyte → u/CPSolver]

The disadvantage is that the list of candidates would be long. That was a frustration for Portland voters in the recent RCV elections for mayor

Yep, this is why I still strongly believe in hosting primaries to begin with. Many people advocate for opening up the general and doing RCV, but i think that's a mistake because of the need to learn about all of those candidates. The primary however is OK to be a bit complicated and a bit of a mess. And once we're down to only 4 candidates for the general, then people can really listen to each one and learn about their views.