Ruling ends primary debate

The Supreme Court of Washington deserves credit for acting promptly on what should be — cross your fingers — the final legal maneuver over the state’s primary election system.

Unlike the Legislature, which took the entire 2004 session coming up with a plan to replace the state’s invalid blanket primary, the court acted with dispatch. That spares the state the prospect of political chaos in a wide-open election year. It also gives state and local elections officials and campaign organizations valuable certainty about the structure they’ll be dealing with for the Sept. 14 primary election.

That structure would look familiar to voters in Montana and Idaho, where it’s already in place. But it will be an unnerving contrast to what Washington voters have known for 70 years. No longer will Washington state voters be able to vote for a Republican in one primary and a Democrat in another. Instead, they will have to select one party’s ballot or the other’s and limit themselves to the choices listed there.

One aspect of the court’s ruling, issued Thursday and released without explanation, is to underscore the distinction between a primary election, in which parties choose the candidate to represent them, and a general election, in which the full electorate chooses public office-holders. The blanket primary, to the chagrin of party leaders, allowed any registered voter to help choose the representative of a party without having to belong to it.

There are far fewer party leaders than voters, however, and state lawmakers, elected by the latter, consistently refused to take away the flexibility that the blanket primary gave their constituents. Not so the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 2000 that the blanket primary was unconstitutional in California and Alaska, two of the last three states to use it. The blanket primary violated the parties’ right to control their own processes, the court held.

Washington, the last holdout, went to the Supreme Court last year and lost, leaving it to the Legislature to come up with a workable alternative. The Legislature did not perform admirably. It dawdled through the entire session in Olympia, finally coming up with an equivocal response.

Lawmakers approved a so-called Louisiana system, which would have rendered party affiliation irrelevant. The top two vote-getters would advance to the general election ballot, even if from the same party. Such a system would have made it even harder than it is now for third-party and independent candidates. But in case the courts rejected that plan, the lawmakers tossed in the Idaho-Montana system as a backup.

The courts didn’t have to strike down the Louisiana system and its potential mayhem, Gov. Gary Locke did it with a partial veto. The Washington State Grange, one of the architects of the historic blanket primary challenged the veto in court, leading to Thursday’s ruling.

It’s time for the Grange and others who are grieving the blanket primary to accept its demise. Washington has a new system, one that will demand that primary voters declare, at least for a day, that they are members of the political party whose ballot they decide to mark. Contrary to the parties’ desires, such declarations will not be made public. Parties will not have any more information about voters for their mailing lists than they have at present.

And, of course, voters who simply won’t acquiesce to the demands of the new primary can sit it out and still participate in the general election, the one that selects public officials, not just candidates.