by Brandon Burley and The Redemption Project
Open primaries, closed primaries and ranked-choice voting are often thrown into the same election-reform debate. They do not solve the same problem. Understanding what each rule actually controls is the first step toward having a useful argument about changing it.
Most Tennesseans can tell you whom they voted for.
Far fewer could explain the rules that determined which names reached their ballot in the first place.
That distinction matters.
We spend enormous amounts of time arguing about candidates while paying much less attention to the machinery that produces them.
Open primary.
Closed primary.
Independent.
Party nominee.
Ranked-choice voting.
Top two.
Runoff.
Those phrases are often discussed as though they are competing solutions to the same problem.
They are not.
Some election rules decide who gets into the room. Others decide what happens once everyone is inside.
Understanding that difference makes almost every election-reform argument easier to follow.
Start with what a primary actually does
In a traditional partisan primary, voters are not yet choosing the person who will necessarily hold the office.
They are choosing who will represent a political party in the general election.
That is why the rules governing primaries matter so much.
The central question is:
Who gets to help a party choose its nominee?
States answer that differently.
The National Conference of State Legislatures currently divides state primary systems into several categories, including closed, partially closed, open to unaffiliated voters, partially open, open and multi-party systems.
In a traditional closed primary, participation is generally limited to voters who qualify as members of that party.
In an open primary, voters generally may choose which party primary to participate in without first being formally registered with that party. A voter still does not get to vote in multiple party primaries for the same election.
Other states operate somewhere between those models.
That is the first layer of election design.
Who may participate?
Tennessee is more complicated than the old “open primary” label
Tennessee is an especially good example of why labels can mislead.
Tennessee does not register voters by political party.
For years, that fact led many people to casually describe Tennessee as an open-primary state.
But Tennessee law contains another requirement.
A voter seeking to participate in a party primary must either be a bona fide member of and affiliated with that party or, when seeking to vote, declare allegiance to the party and state an intention to affiliate with it.
The state also requires polling places to display warnings about those requirements. The Associated Press noted during Tennessee’s 2026 primary that the state still does not maintain ordinary party-registration rolls, while the terms “bona fide” membership and party allegiance remain part of the law.
NCSL now classifies Tennessee as a closed-primary state.
That produces an unusual system.
There is no ordinary Republican, Democratic or independent designation on the Tennessee voter-registration form like voters encounter in many other closed-primary states.
Yet primary participation is not legally unrestricted.
That distinction has also produced litigation. Plaintiffs have challenged the statutory language as vague, particularly because Tennessee does not formally register voters by party and the statute does not precisely define what constitutes a bona fide party member. Earlier federal challenges were dismissed on procedural grounds rather than producing a ruling that erased the underlying statutory requirements.
So before debating whether Tennessee should “open” or “close” its primaries, we first need to describe the system accurately.
It is not as simple as the old label suggested.
Why parties care who votes in their primaries
This is where the argument becomes philosophical.
Political parties have an obvious interest in controlling their own nominations.
A Republican primary exists to choose a Republican nominee.
A Democratic primary exists to choose a Democratic nominee.
From the party perspective, allowing people with no genuine connection to the organization to select its nominee can look less like participation and more like interference.
Tennessee law recognizes substantial party authority on the candidate side as well. The Tennessee Supreme Court has held that a party’s state executive committee can determine whether a candidate qualifies as a bona fide member under party rules.
But the voter sees another side of the system.
Primaries are conducted through official election machinery.
County election commissions run them.
Public polling places are used.
State election laws govern them.
And public money helps pay for them. Tennessee enacted legislation in 2026 governing state reimbursement to county election commissions for certain primary-election expenses when the General Assembly appropriates funding for that purpose.
That creates the tension.
The party asks:
Why should people outside our political association choose our nominee?
The taxpayer can ask:
If the public is administering the election, how private is the decision?
Neither question is frivolous.
They reflect two different interests occupying the same election.
And then Tennessee’s political geography complicates it again
Primary rules matter even more when one party dominates a district.
Imagine a legislative district where one party routinely wins the November general election by an overwhelming margin.
Technically, November determines the officeholder.
Practically, the decisive contest may have happened in August.
That means a party nomination process can sometimes function as the most consequential election available to voters in that district.
This is one reason arguments over primary participation become much larger than internal party procedure.
The disagreement becomes:
Who should have influence when the party primary is effectively deciding who governs everyone?
That is a legitimate democratic tension.
And no slogan resolves it.
Ranked-choice voting answers a completely different question
Now we can separate another commonly confused idea.
Ranked-choice voting does not, by itself, tell us who is allowed to participate in a party primary.
It changes how votes are expressed and counted.
In the common single-winner form often called instant-runoff voting, voters rank candidates rather than selecting only one.
First choice.
Second choice.
Third choice.
If no candidate reaches the required winning threshold, the lowest-performing candidate is eliminated and ballots cast for that candidate can transfer to the next ranked choice. The process continues according to the system’s rules until a winner emerges.
That is a vote-counting mechanism.
Open versus closed primary is a participation rule.
One asks who gets a ballot. The other asks what the ballot does with your choices.
Those debates can interact.
They are not interchangeable.
Tennessee has already made one decision about ranked-choice voting
Tennessee lawmakers acted on ranked-choice voting in 2022.
The General Assembly passed legislation prohibiting county election commissions from using instant-runoff or ranked-choice voting to conduct elections for statewide or local government offices. Gov. Bill Lee signed the legislation, and it became Public Chapter 621.
That is the current legal baseline.
So a Tennessee voter can certainly debate the merits of ranked-choice voting.
But adopting it for the offices covered by that prohibition would first require changing state law.
The policy arguments themselves remain separate.
Supporters often contend ranking candidates can reduce spoiler concerns and allow voters to express preferences beyond one name.
Opponents raise concerns about complexity, ballot exhaustion, tabulation and whether voters understand how later preferences may be used.
Those arguments are worth examining.
But first we should be clear about what is being debated.
Ranked-choice voting does not automatically create an open primary.
An open primary does not automatically create ranked-choice voting.
There is another system people often confuse with both
Some states have moved to multi-party or “top-two” and “top-four” primary systems.
Those change another part of the machinery.
Rather than separate Democratic and Republican nomination contests, candidates can appear together in a single primary, with a specified number of top finishers advancing to the general election.
California and Washington use top-two systems. Alaska uses a top-four model. NCSL classifies these separately from traditional open and closed partisan primaries.
Again, notice the question being changed.
Closed versus open asks:
Who can participate in a party’s nomination?
Top-two or top-four asks:
Which candidates advance from the preliminary election?
Ranked-choice asks:
How are voter preferences counted?
Those are three different design decisions.
Public debate often collapses all three into the phrase “election reform.”
That is where confusion begins.
Independents are candidates, not a political party
There is another terminology problem worth cleaning up.
An independent candidate and a third-party candidate are not the same thing.
An independent candidate is running without a political party nomination.
A minor-party candidate represents an organized political party that has satisfied applicable ballot-access requirements.
Tennessee law gives recognized minor parties options that independents do not have.
Recognized minor parties may nominate candidates using a method authorized under their party rules or through a primary election. Tennessee enacted that framework in 2012.
But becoming a recognized minor party is not automatic.
Current Tennessee law requires organizers seeking recognition to submit petitions containing signatures from registered voters equal to at least 2.5% of the votes cast for gubernatorial candidates in the most recent gubernatorial election. Recent legislative proposals have described that as the existing legal threshold.
That is a different obstacle from simply qualifying as an independent candidate.
And it helps explain why discussions of “third parties” have to include ballot-access law.
A political party needs more than voters who like its ideas.
It needs legal recognition, organization and a path onto the ballot.
Political competition is shaped by rules before voters ever begin comparing candidates.
So why are taxpayers involved at all?
This may be the most interesting question.
If the Republican and Democratic parties are choosing their own nominees, why should the government operate the election?
There is no single philosophical answer everyone accepts.
There is, however, a practical answer in Tennessee:
The state has chosen to make party primaries part of the official election system.
Election commissions administer them under state law, and Tennessee provides mechanisms for public reimbursement of election expenses.
That arrangement creates transparency and uniform public administration.
It also creates a reasonable policy debate about how much authority the parties should retain over a process the public administers.
Someone can reasonably emphasize freedom of political association.
Someone else can reasonably emphasize taxpayer access and the public consequences of nominations.
Those arguments begin from different values.
Neither should begin from an inaccurate description of the system.
Most election-reform fights are really several questions disguised as one
Once we separate the machinery, the debate becomes much easier to follow.
There is the participation question:
Who may vote in the nomination process?
There is the advancement question:
Which candidates reach the final election?
There is the counting question:
How should voter preferences produce a winner?
There is the party question:
How much control should political organizations have over their nominees?
There is the access question:
How difficult should it be for independent and minor-party candidates to reach the ballot?
And there is the public-administration question:
What part of that process should taxpayers operate and finance?
Those questions can produce different answers.
Someone could support open primaries and oppose ranked-choice voting.
Support closed primaries and support ranked-choice voting.
Support easier minor-party ballot access while still believing parties should control their own nominations.
None of those positions is inherently contradictory.
They concern different pieces of the system.
Understand the machinery before choosing the repair
Election rules are not neutral in their consequences.
Change who participates and you may change the electorate selecting nominees.
Change who advances and you may change general-election competition.
Change how votes are counted and you may change campaign strategy and coalition-building.
Change ballot-access rules and you may change who has a realistic opportunity to compete.
Those are substantial decisions.
That is precisely why they deserve something better than slogans.
Before asking whether Tennessee should open a primary, close it, rank candidates, expand ballot access or redesign elections entirely, start with four questions:
Who gets to participate?
Who advances?
How are the votes counted?
Who controls the process?
Once those are clear, the political argument can begin.
Until then, people may be passionately disagreeing about systems they are not actually describing correctly.
Election reform begins with changing rules.
Civic literacy begins with knowing which rule you are trying to change.
I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I am a commentary writer for Tennessee Lookout and a weekly columnist with Knox TN Today. My work examines public policy, public safety systems and civic responsibility. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.
