To the Editor:

Re “We Need Expert Advice on Candidates” (Op-Ed, June 26):

Larry M. Bartels is right that “voters make better- informed and more coherent choices when the race involves two or three major candidates.” But should it be party elites, who may miss a promising younger candidate, like Barack Obama in 2008, that tell the electorate who is right for the job?

I suggest that ordinary voters are up to this task, but they need a better way of making choices. They shouldn’t be forced into choosing one candidate, as is true in primaries today, or be required to rank many candidates — an impossible task with 20 or more candidates — as has been proposed.

A more reasonable way would be to use approval voting, whereby voters can approve of the one or more candidates they consider acceptable. The candidates with the most approval over all would rise to the top and be the candidates who m voters, if they are not their first choices, believe to be qualified.

Approval voting is now widely used in many private and some public elections. It deserves to be tried out in presidential primaries, which in the past have chosen candidates who only a minority faction of party voters thinks are qualified.