Archive for August, 2008
With Washington State’s new Top-Two Primary coming up on August 19, several political parties are publicly whining about the fact that they can no longer no longer restrict the voting rights of Washington voters. The Republican, Democratic, and Libertarian parties, set in motion anti-democratic (note the lower-case “d”) lawsuit against the voters of the State of Washington. This lawsuit led to the Federal Court cases in 2001 and 2003 that invalidated the popular Blanket Primary which allowed voters to actually vote for the candidates they preferred, regardless of party affiliation. Now these parties are complaining about the consequences of their actions and the response of this state’s voters.
Washington now has, thanks to voter initiatives, a so-called Top-Two Primary, in which the top two vote-getters in the primary, regardless of party affiliation, move on to the general election in November. This means that if there are four candidates in a primary election, for example, two Democrats, one Republican, and one Libertarian, and the two Democrats end up with more votes than the other two candidates, the general election ballot will only feature the two Democrats, leaving the Republican and the Libertarian out of the race.
On August 4, the Seattle Times ran an article detailing the plight of the Libertarian Party and one of its candidates, Ruth Bennett in the primary campaign this year. It seems that Bennett and her party finds it unfair that the voters did an end-around to negate the assault on voter rights that Bennett’s Libertarian Party was a party to. The Libertarian Party chair and Bennett said in the Times:
Libertarian Party officials, and others from the Green Party and the Progressive Party, say the new top-two primary system essentially has eliminated their chances of getting to the general election and discouraged many potential candidates from running.
“Everyone who was so eager to take that extra step [and run for office] had the opinion that we had been removed from that equation,” said Scott Lindsley, chair of the Washington State Libertarian Party.
Because only two candidates from each primary race will go on to the general election, most third-party candidates will be shut out by Republican and Democratic candidates. With the old system, third-party candidates usually faced little competition from members of their own party in the primary before going on to the general election.
Ruth Bennett, running as a Libertarian for state representative in the 37th Legislative District, says she will be on the general-election ballot only because she’s in a two-person race with a Democratic incumbent.
“The challenge for minor parties is always to be relevant, and I-872 has made them irrelevant,” Bennett said, referring to Initiative 872, which voters approved in 2004 to create the top-two primary system.
The Republicans and the Democrats are also complaining about Initiative 872.
Well, that is just two bad for these political parties. They are now reaping what they sowed. They took away the right of the people to vote in a truly democratic manner, and now they complain and whine about the alternative chosen by those self-same voters. There is a movement in King County to make all county elected positions non-partisan. Hopefully, this effort will succeed, and another voter initiative will drive the authoritarian political parties out the door. The parties started this battle, and now the voters need to finish it. The voters need to make every state office, from the governor to the legislature, legally and publicly non-partisan.
