Fixing nominations to empower parties, voters

Louisiana legislators seem poised to fix a curiously known omission that promises a boost to state political parties.

 HB 906 by Republican state Rep. Beth Billings quietly was amended at the end of March. Originally a prosaic bill that dealt with signature numbers to qualify for the presidential ballot, instead it became a vehicle also to take semi-closed primary elections for congressional, Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, Public Service Commission, and Supreme Court contests and make them completely closed, as far as the U.S. Constitution allows, at the behest of recognized political party organizations at least 180 days prior to such an election.

Additionally, it made presidential nominations and political party parish and state governance body elections also subject to this option. This means that parties can allow only those registered with the party to vote in these primaries. Louisiana would join eight other states with this arrangement.

The idea is nothing new to recent Louisiana electoral history. This system the state had for 2008-10 for congressional elections only, so it just broadens the scope. Back then, Republicans chose to close their primaries completely, while Democrats let theirs stay semi-open. Constitutional jurisprudence is such that First Amendment rights are abrogated if a state passed a statute forcing completely closed primaries, but if parties are given the choice that arrangement is constitutional.

Democrats then chose that because they still had a clear advantage in registrations, but since have lost considerable ground to both Republicans and unaffiliated voters. This time, they appear willing to join Republicans in closing completely their primaries as a means to attract more registrants.

But not without unprincipled fuss on their part in trying to stop the bill’s inevitable march to law. In the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee, complaints arose from Democrats about how it would shut out unaffiliated voters. That’s about as nonsensical as the overblown whining about recent legislative efforts to reapportion the state’s congressional map from race-based to more geographically- and traditionally-based districts: just as no citizen is being denied the right to vote for a candidate of his choice by changing the map, no voter also is denied that as long as he chooses to affiliate with the desired candidate’s party at least 30 days prior to the election.

After all, the most important decision that any party can make is who to nominate for offices. A party that allows outsiders to influence that has no means by which to promulgate an agenda that all of its elected officials can follow. Strengthening agenda-setting brings more predictability to voters and encourages them to evaluate candidates on the basis of ideas, rather than as free agents exploiting partisanship (or lack thereof) as a means to impose their own agenda, creating confusion and focusing policy-making outputs primarily on personality.

Why, with the reintroduction of closed primaries and their extension in 2024, the enabling legislation didn’t include the previous option is mystifying. Yet that oversight now seems on the verge of correction, and not a minute too soon.