Bill Would Retain Partly Open Primaries

The growing number of California voters who decline to register with Democrats, Republicans or any other political party would retain the right to vote in primary elections under a bill amended Tuesday.

State Sen. Steve Peace (D-El Cajon) called his legislation a small step toward restoring the open voter choice inherent in the “blanket primary” system struck down Monday by the U.S. Supreme Court.

California voters installed the blanket primary by passing Proposition 198 in 1996. Polls showed that most voters liked the system because it freed them to pick among all candidates regardless of party.

The Supreme Court ruled that so much voter freedom interfered with a party’s right to nominate its own candidates. Under the ruling, California primary elections will return to the closed system under which roughly 2 million voters who have declined to register with a party would not be allowed to choose candidates. Such unaffiliated voters made up 9% of voters in California a decade ago; today they are 14%.

The bill by Peace--who is considering running for secretary of state, California’s overseer of elections--would free California’s seven major and minor political parties to allow independent voters to request the ballot of any party on election day.

Gov. Gray Davis supports the Peace bill, and retired state Sen. Art Torres, chairman of the California Democratic Party, said he will recommend changing party rules to allow “decline-to-state” voters to use Democratic ballots on election day.

“The party has always opposed allowing members of other parties to vote in our primary,” Torres wrote to Davis in a June 25 letter, “but the issue of independent voters is a different question.”

Jon Fleischman, executive director of the California Republican Party, said the Peace bill “puts the cart before the horse.” Party leaders, not state government, he said, should determine who gets to help nominate a party’s candidates.