Santa Claus is on the ballot, but that’s only one of the reasons.

Closed primary elections are not ideal for American democracy. In most states, the Democratic and Republican parties act as gatekeepers. They regularly bar independent voters from taking part, giving small percentages of older, wealthier hyperpartisans the power to select the general election menu for all levels of government. Appeasing this subset of voters requires politicians to both run and govern closer to the extremes, leaving the somewhat more moderate independent voters that make up 40 percent of the American electorate with scant representation.1 Mix in misinformation and carefully cultivated culture wars and voila! America is far more divided than it should be.

Open primaries, so called because they’re open to all candidates and all voters, are one antidote to fevered partisanship. In an open primary, the major parties can’t dictate which voters take part. And with all voters in play, candidates have less incentive to ally themselves with those on the fringes.

But not all open primaries are the same. “Top-four” or “top-five” races send the four or five top candidates on to the general election. Others, called “top-two” races, send just two. The number of candidates that advances matters hugely to an open primary’s success in overcoming the more destructive forms of partisanship and building a well-rounded slate of candidates. Alaska’s top-four primary system has important advantages over those in states such as Washington and California, where only two candidates make it to the general election:

Minimizing the chances that one party will monopolize the general election ballot;

Leaving more room for third-party and independent candidates to compete;

Opening the way to ranked choice voting; and

Reducing the need for strategic voting, where voters support a candidate who’s not their favorite but can likely beat the one they just can’t stand and/or has the best chance at success.

Here’s more on why advancing four (or five) candidates from an open primary is better than just two.

IN A TOP-FOUR OPEN PRIMARY, PARTIES HAVE A HARDER TIME MONOPOLIZING THE GENERAL ELECTION

In 2016, two Democrats won the top-two open primary for one of California’s Senate seats. Kamala Harris, now Vice President, won 40 percent of the open primary vote. Second-place candidate Loretta Sanchez won 19 percent. It was the first time since California introduced direct elections in 1914 that no Republican had ended up on the ballot. True, the state has shifted leftward, and a Republican win would have been a stretch. But if the primary had yielded more winners, Republican voters at least could have had representation on the ballot and a voice in the general election contest through the third- and fourth-place primary finishers, Duf Sundheim and Phil Wyman.

A similar situation unfolded in Washington State in 2020, where the top-two open primary for lieutenant governor sent two Democrats to the general election. About 7 percent of the nearly 1,000 top-two primaries run in Washington State since 2008 have seen candidates from the same party advance to the general. In 37 general elections, Democrats have been the only party on the ballot. Same goes for Republicans in 32 elections.

Top-two proponents argue that same-party elections simply reflect the preferences of a particular political jurisdiction. If a district is overwhelmingly Democratic, what’s the problem with having two Democrats running? they would say. Well, if more bipartisanship and less polarization is the goal, America’s political systems should be structured accordingly. Running two candidates of the same political party in a general election, to the exclusion of all other candidates, eliminates a high-profile public forum for debating political philosophies. And when people do not see their values represented in a race and/or don’t like the candidates, they become alienated from the democratic process.

Duopoly is a proble...