The Machines’ Days Are Numbered : Voting: The open primary will empower independents and the disillusioned.

I must confess. Some years ago, for a few weeks, I was a Republican.

For most of my career as a journalist, I’ve been registered as an independent. I figure that is most appropriate for someone who reports on public affairs and tries to write about them in a fair, balanced manner. Like other journalists, I take pride in routinely being accused by Democrats of being a Republican and by Republicans of being a Democrat.

But I must confess my brief affiliation with the GOP because it will help explain why the most important outcome of last Tuesday’s primary election was the enactment of Proposition 198, the Open Primary Initiative.

Starting in 1998, all voters--Democrats, Republicans and 1.5 million political independents like me--will receive primary ballots listing the names of every candidate in every party, major or minor. And we can cast our ballots for whomever we like best, regardless of political affiliation.

Not surprisingly, leaders of the two major parties are threatening to take Proposition 198 to court. But I can’t envision too many judges in California deciding that political parties have more rights than individual voters--although I know plenty of people in both major parties who act that way.

I “became” Republican, in fact, because of an especially egregious act of arrogance by one of the two Democratic factions that dominate politics on Los Angeles’ Eastside.

The factions revolve around the two senior Latino officials in town, County Supervisor Gloria Molina and City Councilman Richard Alatorre. Their loyalists constantly maneuver against each other to recruit and groom candidates for seats in the Legislature, City Council and Board of Education.

Apparently, casting your lot with one side is akin to taking a blood oath against the other. But loyalty I can understand. Grooming candidates-in-waiting is forgivable, too. What irritates me is how they hand-pick candidates.

Well before any election where a seat is open on the Eastside, word goes out from one faction, then the other, designating their favored candidates. That’s a signal to fund-raisers and activists to swing into action on behalf of the man or woman who has Richard’s or Gloria’s blessing. (Last names are never necessary.)

What galls me is the unspoken assumption that thousands of Eastside Latino voters should have no say in the matter. Once the two factions fight it out in the Democratic primary, the Eastside residents’ vote in November is a mere formality.

That’s because most Eastside districts are gerrymandered to heavily favor Democrats. Which means that even when those Democrats are political hacks--which has been the case more than a few times--they still manage to win public office.

That was the situation a few years ago, when a particularly dense but slavishly loyal operative in one of the Eastside factions narrowly defeated a smart, young businessman for a seat in the Legislature.

I was venting my frustration over that turn of events late one evening at Lucy’s El Adobe, the Mexican restaurant in Hollywood that has long been a hangout for political junkies. I’d had too many margaritas and was boasting to the late Frank Casado, the Latino activist who ran the restaurant with his wife Lucy, that even I could beat the clod the Eastside machines had come up with this time.

“I oughta’ register as a Republican and run against him,” I shouted.

Frank, always up for making political mischief, reached under the bar and came up with a voter registration card. And with a somewhat shaky stroke of the pen, I became a Republican.

I didn’t remember what I’d done until a few weeks passed and I started getting lots of junk mail addressed to “My Fellow Republican.” I quickly reregistered as an independent, swearing never again to join a political party or let Casado ply me with his margaritas.

As for the Eastside hack, he’s won reelection regularly ever since, despite his lackluster record. But his days are numbered. In a few years, he’ll fall victim to another political reform that California voters enacted by initiative: term limits.

Political party leaders predicted the onset of anarchy in state government when term limits passed in 1990, but it hasn’t happened. (Or if it has, nobody has noticed.) We may yet find that open primaries also work out better than naysayers claim. Open voting can cripple the machines’ control by giving all primary voters choices outside the anointed favorites. This may not screen out all the hacks and political extremists who’ve made California politics so unproductive of late. But it does set up one more hurdle for them to overcome before getting elected: the many independent-minded Californians who often don’t vote nowadays because we don’t like the choices major parties give us.