The national office of Independent Voters (Independentvoting.org) and a national committee of independent voters has just launched a national campaign called “Eyes On 2020” — a national campaign to open all of the closed Democratic and Republican Party primary elections across America to nonpartisan open primary elections.

As part of this national campaign, Western Colorado Independent Voters is holding a public town hall meeting at 7 p.m. Feb. 21, at the Glenwood Springs Library in downtown Glenwood Springs to discuss nonpartisan options such as “top two” and “top four” primary elections, as well as ranked-choice voting to be established for the state of Colorado.

Depending on how you look at it, Colorado now has a semi-closed or semi-open primary election process, which saw its first election in 2018. It is still not a democratic election process or system.

Our local Democrats and Republicans are good people, but they need to know that their parties can’t own the entire election system. All voters should own our election process and not the Democratic and Republican parties. Also, taxpayers need to stop paying for their primary elections. Why should citizens continue to subsidize these political parties? This should be unconstitutional.

The national office for Independent Voters recently sent a letter to Tom Perez, chairman of the National Democratic Party, asking him and the DNC to open the primaries across America to independents and third parties. Over 1,200 independent voters signed this letter including myself. Eventually, the same letter will be sent to the chair of the Republican National Committee.

All independent voters and the public are welcome to join in this discussion. Let’s open our primary election system to everyone regardless of political party. Let’s make our elections nonpartisan. This is what democracy should look like.

Randy Fricke

Western Colorado Independent Voters

New Castle