Andrew Yang has a podcast, and on November 11, he hosted Lee Drutman for an hour and seven minutes. Here is a link to the Yang podcasts. To hear Drutman, choose “All politics is tribal”, which is currently second from the top. Drutman is a political scientist and a supporter of proportional representation for the United States; he is also the author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: the case for Multiparty Democracy in America.”

Yang supports top-five primaries. At the 44 minute mark, he said to Drutman that because the movement for proportional representation for the U.S. seems so slow, perhaps Drutman agrees that it is better at this time to work for top-five primaries. But Drutman said “no”, and that it would make things worse. Drutman said we should eliminate primaries. He also said that it is socially useful to give parties control over whom they nominate.

This conversation is very important. Kudos to Yang for hosting Drutman, and kudos to Drutman for his message.

On November 2, Minneapolis elected two members to the Board of Estimate and Taxation. The races were citywide. Samantha Pree-Stinson, a member of the Socialist Party, won one of the seats.

The Board has six members, but only two are elected directly. The other members are the Mayor, the President of the City Council, a member of the Park and Recreation Board, and a city council member. The latter two members are chosen by their respective boards. The Board of Estimate and Taxation sets maximum tax rates for most city funds, and helps manage the city’s debt.

There were four candidates. Ranked choice voting was used, but the results would have been the same without RCV. Thanks to Independent Political Report for this news. Here is a page from the Socialist Party’s website, with a statement by Pree-Stinson.

Andrew Yang and his Forward Party have a website, which can be seen here. Yang and the Forward Party support top-four or top-five systems, in which parties don’t have nominees and all candidates appear on the same primary ballot. Then, the top four, or top five, appear on the November ballot, and the November ballot (but not the primary ballot) uses ranked choice voting.

When Yang announced his support for that type of election system, he referred to it as an “open primary.” But he and the website now refer to it instead as a “nonpartisan primary.” This is a welcome change, because it cuts down on confusion. “Open primary” has been defined in U.S. Supreme Court decisions (in footnotes) several times as a system in which each party has its own nominees and its own primary ballot, but on primary election day, any voter is free to choose any party’s primary ballot. Nineteen states have open primaries.

To call a top-five system an “open primary” muddles the discussion, because it is always confusing when the same term is used to describe two very different things.