PDHblog
This is a place for members of Progressive Democrats of Hawai‘i to express their thoughts
and exasperations about political happenings. The opinions and views are not necessarily
those of PDH's steering committee or membership as a whole.

Note: This post started as a reply to frosty’s post, but it got too long.

A wise poet once wrote: “First, there is a mountain. Then there is no mountain. Then there is.” I think it was Heraclitus. Or Rumi. Basho? OK, maybe it was Donovan.

My views have been evolving during the course of the debate within the Party over the wisdom of filing a lawsuit to force a change from our current “open primary” system to a “semi-closed” primary. I had been a strong supporter of both a “closed primary” and of the lawsuit as a means to get there. As the debate went on, I began to have doubts about the wisdom of filing a lawsuit AT THIS TIME, because the lawsuit advocates had done a very poor job, in my mind, of building support for the lawsuit among Democratic elected officials and among our strategic allies in the trade unions and broader community.We explored the option of having the suit filed by some Party members rather than by the Party itself, but that option was no longer available after a similar independent lawsuit by 72 individual Idaho Republicans was thrown out of Federal Court due to lack of legal standing to sue. The Party could have sued, but not the individual party members.

An alternative idea was to have the Party file the lawsuit, but immediately AFTER the 2008 General Election.The lawsuit advocates rejected this out of hand, and with some justification. Forces within Democratic Party circles have been opposing such a lawsuit for years and leaders of the Party had been stalling on filing this suit for about a year. Besides, any such deal worked out by the current State Central Committee would not be binding on the new SCC, which will be elected in late May at the State Convention. Also, there is a very real chance that pro-lawsuit advocates will be targeted for defeat in those May elections by opponents of the suit, so any post-May action has little chance of ever happening.

Once the story broke into the media, it became necessary to try to explain the pro-lawsuit position. Two letters from Party stalwarts Richard Port and Guy Archer supporting the lawsuit were published in the Honolulu Advertiser and can be found here. It seems to me that there are two intertwined but different conceptions of the lawsuit in the pro-lawsuit narrative and it would strengthen their arguments if the advocates would recognize this. The first argues that primary election decisions should be made by party members and this decision should not be interfered with by outsiders. This is the core argument in your posting above, Frosty, and it runs through Richard Port’s letter. It flows directly from the logic of the US Supreme Court ruling in the California v. Jones case, as well as the subsequent Arizona case. This was my line of thinking until a couple of months ago. But when I tried to “shop” this view with my friends and with legislators, I found that they did not like the idea at all. This is the conception that was rejected by the AFL-CIO leadership, as well.

Guy Archer’s letter makes a slightly different argument and is consistent with a second, different view of what new system is desired. It is not clear to me if their prefered system would be like California’system, which is “semi-closed,” or if it would be an “open primary, public record” system. This language is a bit confusing as there have not been adequate discussions and the terms are not agreed upon. In an effort to avoid the term “closed primary,” advocates have tried using the phrase “pure party primary,” but I suggest the term uncomfortably connotes a “purist” attitude and compounds the PR problem. We really should not try to invent our own language simply for PR purposes, but use terms from the general literature.

Primary systems like Hawaii’s are sometimes called, “open primary, private choice.” In Hawaii, a voter is currently allowed to vote in any party’s primary, but only one party, and that choice is made in the privacy of the voting booth with no record kept of which primary the voter chose. The California system of semi-closed primary was developed by the State Assembly in response to the Court’s ruling that the previous form of open primary was unconstitutional. Under the current system, when a person registers to vote, the form lists all the political parties with ballot status in California and the person puts a check next to the party in whose primary the person wishes to vote. Or they check a box indicating they “decline to state” a party preference. The act of checking that party’s box makes you a member of that party. (Which is very different from Hawaii.) In California, a voter enters a polling place for the primary election, their name is found in the voter registry and they are given the ballot of the party to which they belong. The parties must notify the Secretary of State, who runs elections in California, if they want to allow “decline to state” voters (”independents”) to vote in their party’s primary. If so, the “decline to state” voters are allowed to choose a ballot from any party willing to allow their participation. Despite the current rhetoric locally within the Democratic Party, the pressure is extremely powerful to allow independents to vote in your party’s primary. You risk pissing them off in large numbers. So if the California system is adopted here, all people currently voting in the Democratic primaries will still be allowed to vote in future primaries under the new system, except the small percentage of “cardcarrying” members of the GOP, the Greens or the Libertarians.

In California, a voter can switch their party affiliation at any time, up until 15 days before the election. While this is extremely easy, it is still “semi-closed.” There is also a “public record” made of which ballot is taken by the “decline to state” voters and this information is passed onto the parties. This allows the party to know the names of those participating it its internal decision-making. Increasingly, the Hawaii lawsuit advocates have been moving away from the “pure party primary” language without having explicitly noted the break. It appears they would be content with the California system of primary here in Hawaii. Yes, the decisionmaking would be limited to “members only”, but the meaning of “party member” would change dramatically with such a shift. And I am not sure that the implications of that change have sunk in. I have certainly not heard it discussed. It is possible that the Legislature would adopt a system that would allow voters to switch their party affiliation on the day of the election itself. The primary would still only be open to “party members” in a very narrow, technical sense, as the election day switchers would become “party members”, if only for that day. The Party, and the candidates/elected officials, would benefit by getting a list of all voters who vote in the Democratic Primary. This can be useful for future mailings target just to likely Democratic voters. Here is a benefit that can be helpful in selling the idea to legislators. It would not be too inaccurate to term a system with such easy access an “open primary, public record” system.

I recognize that a lot of voters do not want their party affiliation to be listed in any publicly accessible master list. They figure that information is their private business. A California-style system would allow them to register as “decline to state” or independent voters and their selection of a Democratic (or Republican, Libertarian or Green) ballot, while public information, will only be evidence of a tactical choice, not necessarily a revelation of fundamental, strategic, political alignment. I have heard very few such details spelled out by the lawsuit advocates within the party, partly because they have been focussed on the lawsuit itself, and partly, I suspect, because they have not fully developed the idea clearly in their own thinking. If they HAVE a clear conception, it is to their advantage to share it within the Party, with legislators and with members of the skeptical public. It would also force them to abandon, at least partially, the “it’s my party” rhetoric which may be internally satisfying, but is unnecessarily inflaming resistance to the change they seek.

Even a shift to an “open primary, public record” primary system would require a great deal of public relations outreach to assuage public suspicion and minimize resistance, but the current strategy had been neglecting the public relations component until it was forced upon them by the story breaking in the Advertiser. And they have not bothered to develop a legislative strategy, apparently thinking it would be unnecessary until after the lawsuit was successful. But because the PR and legislative components had not been put into action, opposition from the unions and elected officials has created resistance that may stop the lawsuit from ever being filed. Too bad, really, since what they have been proposing is really not as big a deal they thought it was. They just fumbled and stumbled their educational work, refusing to spell out in writing just what they were hoping to accomplish.

Oh well…. I think I see a mountain….Perhaps not.