California Primary Voting

Re “Bright Idea for Fixing Primaries,” editorial, Nov. 30:

The Times too easily praised Secretary of State Bill Jones for his proposed technological solution to the brewing political conflict between California voters and the national Democratic and Republican parties. In a nutshell, California voters enacted an initiative setting up an open primary for choosing candidates (so that a voter of any party can vote in a primary for candidates of any party), and the voters rejected Proposition 3 on the November ballot, which would have created an exception to the open primary for presidential nominees.

The national parties said they would refuse to seat delegates to their presidential nominating conventions if the delegates were chosen through an open primary. Jones’ proposed solution is to code ballots with the party affiliation of each voter so that his office can report total returns as well as returns according to party affiliation.

The Jones proposal threatens the legitimacy of our electoral process in two ways. First, it is an end-run around Proposition 3. The voters squarely rejected the idea of an exception to the open primary law for presidential nominations, perhaps because, at least according to one theory, candidates chosen in open primaries tend to be more moderate. Why should Jones be allowed to take away the voters’ ability to send the parties the message that they prefer moderate candidates?

Second, delegates to the nominating conventions will not necessarily reflect majority sentiment. Imagine this scenario: The Democrats have only one candidate on the presidential primary ballot, but the Republicans have both a moderate and a conservative candidate. A majority of California voters (including crossover Democrats) choose the moderate Republican candidate, but a majority of California Republican voters choose the conservative candidate. The Republican Party will view the conservative as the winning candidate, even though she did not get a majority of the total votes. That surely was not the intent of the California voters in passing the open primary law and rejecting Proposition 3.

RICK HASEN

Professor, Loyola Law School

Los Angeles