Secretary of State Ken Bennett
Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett has released the latest voter registration statistics, and the results should scare the willies out of both Democratic and Republican activists.
The two major parties both basically have the same number of registered voters as they had in April (within a couple of thousand), with Republicans at 1.135 million and Democrats at 1.045 million. But nearly 18,000 new voters registered with nonballot parties or are truly independent, bringing their combined total to 897,989. That’s a 2 percent increase over just three months, a rate that would push the number of independent voters higher than registered Democrats by 2012 if nothing else changed.
To be fair, the two major parties are doing almost no voter recruitment during the summer of an off-election year. But barring some huge shake-up in the political landscape, the number of registered independent voters will move higher than Democrats or Republicans within the next five to 10 years.
At that point, won’t it be impossible for the Democrats and Republicans to maintain the two-party dominance of the Arizona election system? Candidates of the Libertarian and Green parties do automatically get on state ballots now. But their party registrations remain incredibly low because most voters view becoming a Libertarian or a Green as useless; only Republicans and Democrats actually are elected to office. So dissatisfied voters are protesting the present system in droves by registering as “other” instead.
Once those dissatisfied voters make up the largest percentage of registrations, it would seem that Republicans and Democrats will be regarded as representing minority views. Large minorities to be sure, but minorities nonetheless. Won’t voters demand changes to the election process so that candidates are elected who represent “the majority”?
This process likely will be accelerated by a federal court ruling earlier this year that Arizona must make it easier for credible independent and small-party presidential candidates to qualify for the state’s general elections. This crack in two-party control potentially could start a flood.
The Republican and Democratic parties are contributing to this erosion of voter strength by continuing to support Arizona’s open-primary system, which allows independent voters to cast ballots in state primaries of one of those parties. I have pointed out before that open primaries appear to be unconstitutional, but only the Libertarian Party has pursued its rights in court and closed its primaries to outsiders.
Maybe it’s already too late, but Republicans and Democrats likely would encourage more voters to join a major party if their primaries were closed as well.
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The original view of political parties were that they were private organizations who decided to field candidates for office according to some party philosophy. Naturally, only those who shared that philosophy should have a say in who those candidates were, hence the “smoke-filled room” and/or the closed primary.
But stupid non-aligned voters complained about not having any input to the choice of candidates, as if they had no power to submit candidates of their own and were forced to take whatever the Rs and Ds handed them. This gave birth to the open primary, which was quickly championed by the Rs and Ds once they realized it legitimized them as not just private political clubs, but integral portions of the mechanism of American government itself.
Now the situation has degenerated to the point where when New Jersey Democrats decided for the sake of CONVENIENCE to pull scandal-plagued candidate Torricelli off their ballot at the 11th hour and substitute Lautenberg — well after all statutory and constitutional deadlines for a change in candidate — the courts allowed it because “you know, there HAS to be a Democrat on the ballot.” Or when both Democrats and Republicans in Texas for no good reason completely missed the statutory deadline to declare their 2008 presidential candidate (a deadline other parties made), they are allowed to file anyway because “you can’t have a ballot without Democrats and Republicans.” And, of course, these parties get taxpayer money to hold their extravagant conventions, while other parties foot their own bills as it should be.
The Republican and Democratic parties should NOT be treated as default alternatives in American politics. The closed primaries should be brought back, and the parties returned to “private club” status. And this would send a message to the “Independents” that if they want a “better choice” than they get from the two old dinosaurs, it’s THEIR job to organize and offer one.