As Idaho voters start to consider the idea of opening primary election ballots in their state to all voters, they might want to view the concept from a neighboring angle.
Oregon also has the question of opening primary elections on its ballot (as do the states of Nevada, Oklahoma, Nebraska and South Dakota). What does the picture look like there?
(Yes, I know the Idaho measure also builds in a ranked-choice vote approach, which Oregon’s doesn’t. I’ll come back to that another time.)
Oregon voters already have gotten mailers from the backing group, All Oregon Votes, which quoted former (nonaligned) gubernatorial candidate Betsy Johnson as saying, “Damn near half the state’s voters are independents. They ought to have an equal voice in our democracy.”
The organization, which says it wants to reduce “hyperpartisanship,” put it this way: “Our measure does not prevent political parties from endorsing or promoting candidates at any stage of the election process. However, political parties should not have an exclusive right to nominate candidates to the general election ballot. That right should be shared by all voters, not just a partisan few.”
Oregon Republicans don’t like it. The dominant forces in its party lean firmly to the right, not the middle, and the current system gives them nominees that match with them.
Neither does the Oregon Democratic Party, which has dominated politics statewide and doesn’t much care to change things. Also, just like across the aisle: The dominant forces in its party lean firmly to the left, not the middle, and the current system gives them nominees that match with them.
Oregon is one of the few states allowing only party members to participate in their primary elections, and that applies to both Democrats and Republicans. Here’s an example of what that means. In last year’s primary election, the top two candidates for Oregon governor, Democrat Tina Kotek (who now holds the office), and Republican Christine Drazan, together pulled just 12.3% of votes from all the registered voters in the state. Only about 30% of the Oregonians qualified to vote were even involved in selecting those two nominees.
The largest slice of Oregon voters is made up of the “nonaligned,” more numerous (there are more than a million) than either Democrats or Republicans. Oregonians are careful to call them NAVs (nonaligned voters) because there also is an Independent Party of Oregon, which has so many members it has sometimes reached major party status alongside the Ds and Rs. What this means is that a lot of registered voters are on the outside when the primary election winnowing takes place.
Oregon’s Initiative Petition 26 would apply to all state and federal offices (other than president and vice president) and allows all candidates to appear on the ballot, “regardless of whether the candidate is or is not affiliated with a political party.” All voters could choose any single candidate for each office. That could mean, for example, voting in the primary for a Republican nominee for the U.S. House, for a Democratic nominee for governor and a nonaligned candidate for the Legislature.
I wrote about this (in another column), “Those debates implicate the question of what a major political party is, whether simply private aggregations of voters or semi-public, though technically private, organizations that effectively control the channels of representative democracy. It may also raise the issue of how well the two major parties are representing the mass of Oregon voters.”
That may have something to do with why the two Oregon parties are cool, at best, to the idea.
It’s a point worth considering in Idaho as voters think about how to fix their badly busted primary election system.
Stapilus is a former Idaho newspaper reporter and editor and blogs at ridenbaugh.com. His email address is stapilus@ridenbaugh.com.
