You may not have noticed, but the Regional California Republican Party is having a meeting this weekend, which they do semi-annually. However, this one looks like it may have a bit more long-term ramifications. It seems the Republicans have decided to take on the role of pre-primary electoral process.
As you probably recall, the Proposition 14 system ends the partisan primary process and replaces it with a so-called “top-two” system, where the top two vote getters, regardless of party, advance to the general election. To be sure, that is something of an infuriating system for members of both parties. But, the Republicans have decided to do something about it. They’ll be sending out a ballot to every registered Republican, beginning in the 2014 statewide election.
The plan was not without controversy, and it looks like it wasn’t going to happen until the modern day Reagan stepped into the fray.
the vote capped often contentious debate at the state GOP convention being held in Sacramento in which outgoing state party Chairman Ron Nehring put forth a nomination plan that have would have let local party officials come up with endorsements. That sparked criticism from some delegates that the endorsement process would have been decided by a small cadre of political insiders.
“The Republican Party will in essence be conducting its own party primary,” McClintock said. “It means in essence that we’ll be doing the job that the secretary of state once did. It’s going to require logistically a lot of work. … The important question is how we will restore the role of the rank-and-file voters across this state.””(SacBee)
This should be an interesting experiment for the Republicans. How this works in practice, however, is still a big question.
That is not run by an independent or elected agency. Very Republican.
Are the local parties doing the endorsements? Or is the state GOP sending out ballots to registered Republicans? If the latter, then I think it’s a swell idea. I never did understand why the state paid for primaries to select candidates for the Democratic and Republican parties. However, I’m not at all clear how sending ballots out to all registered Republicans works with the top-two primary idea. I thought Republicans wanted the top-two primary. But this sounds like they’re trying to do an end-run around it. As I say, I’m confused.
This is an interesting move by the CAL GOP. If the Democrats continue to have pre-primary endorsements done by the state party convention, it will give the GOP a talking point — they will tout their own endorsements as representing all the Republicans in the state, and slam the Dem endorsements as being done by unrepresentative party insiders. OTOH, if the Dems follow suit by doing a mailed ballot to all Dem voters, it’s going to cost them a lot more, because there are 2.2 million more Dems than Reps (7.5 million to 5.3 million).
The reason the state has administered the party primaries, rather than the parties themselves, is the public interest in preventing voter fraud. If a party administers its own primary, there is no way the public at large can be assured of the integrity of the results. If the primary determines which candidates appear on the general election ballot, the public has an interest in guaranteeing the integrity of the primary via nonpartisan administration (in CA, by the secretary of state and the registrar-recorders).
Also, in the Southern states, recognizing the primaries as part of the election process of the state, and therefore subject to state administration, was an important way of breaking down the system of party-controlled whites-only primaries, which controlled access to the general-election ballot, and thereby prevented blacks from effective participation.
I wonder if there will be any impact on the CA pre-primary system from the various Supreme Court rulings in this area, such as Terry v. Adams (1953), which abolished the “Jaybird Primary” in Texas. The Jaybird Primary was a pre-primary that disempowered minority voters by pre-selecting a white-backed candidate, and turning the primary and general election into mere ratifications of the pre-selection.
and might be very smart. I’m not sure the State should be running Party primaries anyway. Let the Parties do it independently.
According to Chairman Eric Bauman at last week’s LA County Dem Party meeting, the state’s County Registrars don’t want to have party elections anymore. They used to include the party officer elections on the primary ballots in each county, since those ballots were ‘by party.’ But with the new ‘open’ (such a misnomer) primary, everyone gets the same ballot. So the registrars don’t want to then have to print up additional ballots and have additional booths for Dems, Reps, etc.
Seems to me that, as expensive as a mailing operation like the Republicans are proposing would be, if we’re going to have to run party elections at the county level anyway, we could at least include endorsement votes for offices within the county.