New primary system finds few friends

OLYMPIA – Voters by the thousands are unhappy that, starting this year, they can no longer pick candidates from multiple political parties in the September primary election.

“My inclination is that I may not vote at all,” said Colville’s Shirley Schrawyer, who’s been voting for 30 years. “I have never in all my voting years voted strictly party lines, and I do not intend to start now.”

The Secretary of State’s office, which is spending nearly $2 million on an ad campaign to tell voters about the change, is fielding plenty of angry comments. The office is getting about 1,000 phone calls a day – and a new e-mail every two minutes – about the new primary.

“This takes away my right to vote for who I want,” said Roger Thompson, in Palisades, Wash. “That’s not constitutionally right. I think somebody ought to start a lawsuit.”

Somebody did. And that’s how Washington ended up being forced to change from its nearly 70-year-old primary election system. (The changes do not affect the November general election, in which voters can pick among candidates from any party.)

For decades, Washington’s popular “blanket primary” was unique in America. Drafted by grange and labor union populists in 1934, it allowed voters to hopscotch among parties on the September primary ballot, picking a Republican here and a Democrat there. The winners advance to the November ballot.

Voters in other states liked this approach. Alaska and California copied it.

But the political parties hated it, because it allowed voters from one party to have a say in picking another party’s candidate in the November election. Such “crossover voting,” the parties argued, violated their constitutional rights.

“What is so hard about the concept that Republicans choose the candidate of the Republican Party and Democrats choose the candidate of the Democratic Party?” said state GOP chairman Chris Vance. “That’s all we want.”

And they got it. Last September, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Washington’s system was unconstitutional. California had already seen its version tossed out by a court, and Alaska’s is gone as well.

“People may have loved the blanket primary, but it’s gone,” said Vance. “And nothing – nothing – is going to bring it back.”

After a lot of stalling and fighting, state lawmakers and Gov. Gary Locke reluctantly sculpted a new system this spring.

Washington’s new primary would look very familiar to people from Idaho or Montana, because it’s modeled on theirs. In partisan races, Washingtonians will now have to pick only one major party – Democrat, Republican or Libertarian – and select only from among candidates from that party. (Minor party candidates automatically advance to the November ballot.) No record is kept of which ballot you choose, elections officials say.

Fearing a rash of messed-up ballots, Secretary of State Sam Reed is running TV and mail ads about the new primary, which Reed opposed but now must implement. Local elections officials are also trying to spread the word.

“We’re getting a fairly substantial number of calls and comments,” said Spokane County elections manager Paul Brandt. “Most of them don’t like it at all.”

Among them: Darlene Fogal.

“I just think it’s criminal,” said the Cheney therapist, 53. “I’m sorry: This is America, land of the free. That (the new primary) is sort of like being in Russia.”

Not everyone agrees. Many political observers can cite races in which they think crossover votes torpedoed a party’s strongest candidate.

“In 1996, a lot of Democrats crossed over and voted for the weaker Republican candidate for governor, knowing that it would improve Gary Locke’s chances of winning the general election,” said Laura Skaer, executive director of the Northwest Mining Association. And that November, Locke easily beat Ellen Craswell, a Christian conservative widely viewed as too far right to win in Washington.

Vance says voters will adapt to the new system “if their elected officials stop trying to undermine it by telling people how terrible it is.

“This is how it’s done in all the rest of America,” he said. “If the people in Oregon, Idaho and Alaska can figure this out, so can the people of Washington.”

The Washington State Grange, trying to protect the widest primary choice for voters, is running a ballot measure this November that would change to a “top two” primary. The top two vote-getters, regardless of party, would advance to the November election. But minor parties say they’d be shut out, and Vance predicted that a top two system would trigger more court fights. He also said the parties would boycott a top two system and revert to picking candidates at party conventions, the way they did in the early 1900s.

For their part, elections officials are urging people to vote in the Sept. 14 primary, even if they hate having to pick a party.

“If they don’t vote, then they’re really turning the decision over to the party loyalists,” said Brandt.