Open State Primary Backed by Business Council

An initiative to resurrect California’s open primary, being circulated for the November 2004 ballot, was endorsed Thursday in a rare move by the Orange County Business Council.

The council, the county’s largest business group, generally doesn’t endorse measures before they’ve qualified for the ballot, Chief Executive Officer Stan Oftelie said. But in this case, he said, the proposal isn’t new: Voters overwhelmingly passed open primaries in 1996 but the law was overturned in court.

“We’ve endorsed this in the spirit of good government and competitive elections,” Oftelie said. “The idea is to give people more opportunities for who they vote for.”

The business council pledged up to $10,000 toward signature-gathering efforts.

The council’s nod represents the second endorsement by a business group for the measure, which also is backed by the California Business Roundtable. Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta are among the measure’s sponsors.

“We’re thrilled to receive the support of such an important business organization,” Riordan said in a prepared statement.

“We are looking forward to working with the Orange County Business Council and others to pass this initiative and to enhance voter choices, increase voter participation and reduce the extreme partisanship that is adversely affecting California state government.”

The proposal calls for all candidates in state or federal races to run on a single primary ballot available to all voters, much like the Oct. 7 recall election.

The top two vote-getters, regardless of party, would run in the general election. Party consent would be required to allow identification of a candidate’s party registration on the ballot and in official election publications.

The measure is based on a Louisiana law upheld by the courts as constitutional, Oftelie said. It needs 598,105 valid voter signatures by March 4 to qualify for the November ballot.

Californians passed Proposition 198 in March 1996, which instituted what became known as a blanket primary. The law allowed voters to cast ballots for any candidate in the primary, with the winners from each party advancing to the general election. Only one set of elections, in 1998, was held under the system.

The Republican, Democratic, Libertarian and Peace & Freedom parties sued. In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the law, saying that having a party nominee chosen by members of an opposing party violated constitutional rights of free association.