I always end up doing a double-take at this time of year. OK, in tomorrow's primary, I'm going to vote for ... Wait a second! I'm not voting for anybody. Because I can't.
I'm registered as an independent. That's for professional reasons. When I moved to York, I knew that I'd be covering politics, and I didn't want anybody to be able to accuse me of bias on the basis of my voter registration.
People still accuse me of bias all the time, of course. But since liberals and conservatives tend to level that accusation in more-or-less equal amounts, I figure I'm doing a pretty good job of keeping partisanship out of my writing.
Pennsylvania has a closed primary system, meaning you have to be registered in a certain party to vote in its primary. And even though it would benefit me personally if the state government changed that, I don't think they should.
People who back an open primary system say, in effect -- hey, the more you can give the voters a chance to make their opinions heard, the better it is for democracy. In most cases, I tend to hold with that philosophy myself.
The argument against open primaries is that political parties would use them to sabotage each other. Say your party has an unopposed candidate or clear front-runner in the primary, but a couple of primary candidates are still duking it out in the other party. Then you'd send your people out to vote for the other party's primary candidate who has the least chance of getting elected in the general election.
Richard Nixon's people (Surprise surprise!) reportedly used that tactic prior to the 1972 election. Before last year's Pennsylvania primary, Rush Limbaugh was urging Republicans to file as Democrats and vote for Hillary Clinton, whom he deemed less electable in November.
That's why I have a problem with the idea, from a democratic standpoint. Whatever members of the public are going to decide about a candidate, let it be because that candidate legitimately represents his or her party's beliefs, not because the candidate is the unwitting beneficary of a sabotage campaign.
Would that happen here in Pennsylvania? Hell yeah, it would happen. And I think it would be demeaning to both parties.
We had a similar situation back in 2006, when Democrat Bob Casey Jr. was challenging Republican Rick Santorum for the U.S. Senate, and Green candidate Carl Romanelli entered the race.
Santorum's people eventually admitted that they were helping Romanelli collect nomination petition signatures, in the apparent hope that the Green candidate would siphon off votes from Casey. And according to a grand jury investigation that came out last year, Democrats illegally paid state workers for the time they spent challenging Romanelli's petitions.
Let's just say that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans came out looking like staunch defenders of democracy in the wake of that whole affair.
Yeah, skulduggery is going to happen in one form or another no matter what you do. But that's no reason to invite it, which is what I believe an open primary would accomplish.
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