There is controversy about the new electoral system in DC. Michael Brice-Saddler reports for the Washington Sun:

For decades, the at-large ballot carried simple instructions: vote for no more than two candidates. Under the new system, voters face a grid prompting them to rank candidates across columns from first to fifth choice. Yet because each ballot contains only one active vote at a time, a voter’s second choice may never be counted.

The new math has forced candidates to reshape their messaging in the home stretch, with contenders aggressively pleading for first-choice votes. The change has also bred friction among voters accustomed to casting two distinct picks, leaving even politically plugged-in residents puzzling over their ballots.

One way for voters to have two “active votes” — or potentially as many as they want — would be to use free-list PR (FLPR). Also known as PR with panachage, FLPR lets voters cast an arbitrarily large number of candidate votes. These then determine how many seats each party gets as well as which candidates get them.

How do we make sure that voters who use more votes don’t get more influence? Similarly, which party gets a vote of the voter who splits their ticket? One solution to both problems is to weight each of a voter’s ballot markings. For example, if I mark three candidates, each gets one-third of my vote. (Some forms of cumulative voting contain a similar mechanism.)

FLPR even might address the current rationale for limiting party nominations. Currently, no party is permitted to run as many candidates as there are seats to fill (a limited-nomination rule). This is intended to prevent a single party from winning all citywide seats contested (two under the staggered-elections provision). The PR part of FLPR would prevent sweeps as long as supporters of non-majority parties were sufficiently numerous and coordinated.

If used instead of the current two-stage rules (primary then general), FLPR also would address concerns about primary type. One reason for the current reform package was to move away from closed party primaries. In some contexts, the worry is that primary voters differ systematically from those who show up for a general. Some argue that primary “openness” would make the two populations more similar. Others argue that it would not because what differs about them is highly correlated with propensity to show up for a primary in the first place. Either way, FLPR could be used to nix the primary altogether.

For more on FLPR, see an excellent article by Polga and Mustillo (2020). On FLPR as a fix for nomination dilemmas in cumulative voting, see this.