The Independent View: America Should Hold Primaries on One Day

This is from an article in The Economist of August 4th.

The system to select candidates to run for Congress might have been designed with the welfare of journalists and lobby groups in mind. Primary elections go from March to September, allowing reporters to travel the country eating barbecue with candidates for seven months.

These primaries attract relatively few voters, meaning that well organized lobby groups hold disproportional sway. Organized labor influences Democratic primaries more than they ought to be the case given that only 11% of workers are union members. In Republican primaries, relatively small outfits like Club for Growth, which campaigns for smaller government, can make a big splash.

So the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think-tank, believes it has a solution.

The center is proposing we do away with our timetable for primaries, and hold them on the same day. It thinks that the change would create a media event, a pre-election election, thereby attracting move voters to the polls and giving more power to moderates. Elaine Kamark of the Brookings Institute, another think-tank, reckons that the two parties, which generally dislike the freakish results that low turnout elections sometime produce might look into this.

The benefits might even outweigh the harm done to the well being of political reporters.

For me, one of the problems of low turnout is the 16 states that have closed primaries (Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wyoming) where only party members can vote.

So states allow the voter to change their registration at the polls so they can get a ballot. Then there are different options to revert to their independent status, such as at the poll site or at City Hall.

But this still has the problem of having to select a party's ballot removing the voters option to select the candidates of their choice.

I would like to see a Blanket Primary, which is less restrictive then a Top-Two Primary.

In a Blanket Primary, voters may pick one candidate for each office without regard to party lines; for instance, a voter might select a Democratic candidate for governor and a Republican candidate for senator. In a traditional blanket primary the candidates with the highest number of votes for each office in each party advance to the general election, as the respective party's nominee. Blanket primaries differ from open primaries – in open primaries voters may pick candidates regardless of their own party registration, but may only choose among candidates from a single party of the voter's choice. A blanket primary gives registered voters maximum choice in selecting candidates.

With this system, a separate ballot is used to select party positions and only party members can use it.