LANE COUNTY, Ore. – A new voting system could be used in Lane County, and it would virtually eliminate primaries.

The system is called STAR voting, and it stands for Scoring, Then an Automatic Runoff. During the vote, voters would be able to see all candidates, regardless of their party affiliation. They would then score each candidate between a 1 and a 5. The two candidates with the highest score would then go into an automatic runoff.

This would mean that there would only need to be one election in November, instead of one in May and one later.

"Right now it seems simple to pick one candidate, the one you like best, but that's often not what voters do. They have to go through a mental calculation of where can my vote make the most effect,” said Alan Zundel, one of the chief petitioners on the system.

Petitioners are in the process of collecting enough signatures to put using this method in a measure on the November ballot. They need to collect about 11,506 by late June. If they succeed in getting enough signatures and if voters then approve the measure, the new system would be tried out in 2020. But it would only be used for county elections for the time being.

You can get involved here.