As itinerant millionaires pour money into denigrating one another to impress a small fraction of the state’s population, while ruining television for everyone else, the state government continues to ignore an easy way to improve the primary election process and state governance.
New Jersey physician and TV host Mehmet Oz and Connecticut former hedge fund president David McCormick both have moved to Pennsylvania to seek the Republican nomination for retiring U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey’s seat. To hear each of them tell it through their ads, the other guy is a very bad person.
They exploit a bad process. The first and most important change should be to allow independent voters to vote in primaries.
Pennsylvania allows only party-affiliated voters to cast ballots in primaries to select their parties’ nominees. Since party loyalists are most likely to vote in typically low-turnout primaries, candidates produce the sort of misleading, extreme ad claims now airing around the clock.
The last few political cycles in Pennsylvania have produced much commentary about the Republican swing in formerly Democratic western counties and the Democrats’ ascendancy in the formerly reliably red Philadelphia suburbs.
But the biggest trend statewide is voters declaring poxes on both houses and registering as independents. Pennsylvania now has 1.2 million independent voters. They may not cast ballots in primaries except on referendums.
Those voters are taxpayers who help pay for the elections and, like everyone else, must live with the results. Yet, they can’t vote. It’s especially ludicrous in municipal elections, in which judicial and school board candidates are allowed to “cross-file” as Democrats and Republicans, potentially sewing up their elections before independents can vote in the general election.
The system also drives bad governance. In Harrisburg, lawmakers refuse to compromise in the public interest for fear of offending the base in their gerrymandered districts, and being “primaried” from the far-right or far-left flank.
Allowing independents to pick a party and cast votes in primaries would work against the extremism that produces legislative paralysis.
State Sen. Lisa Boscola, a Northampton County Democrat, has been trying for 25 years to open the primary polls to independents as a matter of principle. Finally, there appears to be some bipartisan momentum toward that goal on more practical grounds. Alienating and disenfranchising more than 1.2 million voters, a rapidly growing demographic, inevitably produces diminishing returns. Increasingly, politicians have begun to realize that engaging independents, including in the primaries, is a means to get around extremist politics and the paralyzed governance that it produces.
Lawmakers should welcome independents into the primary process by quickly passing a pending bill.
— The Citizens’ Voice, Wilkes-Barre via TNS
