Mark Frohnmayer, the son of the former Oregon Attorney General and University of Oregon president Dave Frohnmayer, sees a primary election system gone wrong. He aims to put an initiative on the ballot to change how Oregon’s works.

But the only way his proposal distinguishes itself is that it’s different.

Oregon has a closed primary system. If you are registered as a Democrat, you can vote in the Democratic primary. Registered Republican? You can vote in the Republican primary. And so on through the parties. If you are registered as unaffiliated, you can’t vote in a primary.

Frohnmayer wants Oregon to try what is called a top two primary. Any registered voter would get one vote in every party primary that the voter wanted to vote in. Only the top two vote getters would advance to the general election.

For instance, a Democrat could vote in the Democratic primary, the Republican primary and as many or as few other party primaries as the voter desired.

Frohnmayer doesn’t like the government shutdown. He doesn’t like that closed primaries can advance candidates who cater to a narrow range of voters. He doesn’t like that closed primaries can disenfranchise unaffiliated voters, carving hundreds of thousands of Oregonians out of the primaries. And as with the case of his dad’s campaign for governor in 1990, a third candidate on the general election ballot can fracture a more moderate candidate’s ability to build a winning coalition.

Those criticisms aren’t fresh, and they are flawed.

First of all, Oregon’s closed primary is almost wide open. It’s easy to change party affiliation and vote in any primary. Most voters can switch affiliation online in minutes.

Of course, some might feel uncomfortable with tactical party switching. And it does mean voters have to make what can be a difficult choice about which party’s primary to vote in. But to say that unaffiliated voters are disenfranchised is not true. And to think that the primaries are closed is not entirely true, either.

Political commentators have also longed for more moderate candidates in office. The hope has been that if only party primaries weren’t so controlled by more conservative or liberal voters, politics and governance would be better.

But is the right way to fix that by switching around the primary system? Nobody wants partisan rancor to cripple governance or elected representatives who don’t represent the wishes of voters. It’s frustrating and feels wrong to sit around and wait for things to right themselves.

When the end result of the political process isn’t meeting the needs of political reformers, like Frohnmayer, they look to change the process. It can be a shortcut toward tilting the vote. It’s not necessarily a shortcut to a better system.