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.