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Put
an End to Open Primaries
Mark
Warner helped defeat conservative General Assembly
candidates by encouraging cross-over voting by
Democrats -- reciprocating previous GOP tactics. The
practice needs to end.
When
California Governor Gray Davis meddled in the
California GOP primary in 2002, at least he did so
openly. Davis, a Democrat, spent $10 million in a
campaign to persuade Republicans in his state not to
nominate a candidate that Davis feared could defeat
him in the general election.
What
Gov. Mark R. Warner and his fellow Virginia Democrats
did in the recent GOP primary elections was even
more cynical. They took advantage of the state law
allowing all registered voters to participate in a
primary election to persuade Democrats to vote in
large numbers for incumbent GOP legislators who,
Warner claimed after the primaries, will help him
raise taxes at the next session of the General
Assembly. It would be hard to prove that this
raiding of the June 10 GOP primary elections by
Democrats determined the outcome in all three senate
contests, but it obviously gave Sen. Russ Potts
(R-Winchester) his 106-vote winning margin.
Warner
secretly aided the GOP senate incumbents.
Democratic legislators and former elected officials
actively urged Democrats to vote for Warner’s
favored Republican in the primary. Some former
Democratic officeholders actually worked the polls
for their preferred GOP candidate.
After
the voting ended on June 10, Warner publicly
celebrated the results in the senate primary
elections. Some Democrats, especially those
who are challenging these GOP incumbents in the
general election, think that Warner’s ploy
undermined the Democratic Party. Clearly,
Warner’s concern is his own political agenda and
not the long-term health of his party.
In
1977, Virginia Democrats were properly outraged when
Republicans raided the Democratic primary to assure
the defeat of then Attorney General Andrew Miller in
his contest with Henry Howell for the party’s
gubernatorial nomination. Republicans
considered Howell the weaker of the two Democrats in
a general election match-up against Republican John
Dalton.
Democrats
returned the favor in the 1989 GOP primary that
nominated Marshall Coleman as the party’s
gubernatorial candidate in a close, three-way
contest. The number of Democrats voting in that
primary far exceeded the margin that gave the
nomination to Coleman.
The
Virginia statute that permits this crossover voting
was itself a cynical attempt by legislators a
quarter century ago to give themselves protection
against intra-party accountability. To neutralize any
attempt by the party rank-and-file to deny them the
party nomination when they sought reelection, these
legislators enacted not only the open primary law,
but also a law allowing incumbents to determine the
particular method to be used to determine the
party’s nominee.
Several
years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a
California statute that allowed all registered
voters to participate in the process of determining
who would represent a political party as its
candidate in a general election. Any party, if it
chooses, can now successfully challenge the Virginia
open primary statute on the basis of that Supreme
Court decision.
The
Supreme Court has consistently ruled that the
Constitution assures citizens the freedom to
associate as they choose for political purposes.
This freedom is violated when one party is forced to
accept citizens of opposing parties in its
nominating process.
A
party that won’t protect the freedom of
association of its members, but chooses instead to
protect incumbent officeholders, is ignoring its
primary responsibility. It can’t continue to be a
vital political party unless it is a bottom-up
party, as opposed to a top-down party.
It’s
time to put an end to open primaries in Virginia and
to all other cynical measures that are designed to
insulate incumbents from political accountability.
June
30, 2003
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