Homeless in Arizona

But if you do believe in the two party system, or multi-party system if you are a Libertarian or Green then Robert Robb addresses some of the problems with this proposed new primary election system.

Source

Top-two's unanswered questions

By ROBERT ROBB

Tue, Oct 02 2012

If the top-two primary initiative passes, the Legislature will have a real mess on its hands.

That’s not because legislators, particularly Republicans, loathe the thing and will have to learn to live with it. It’s because the proponents of Proposition 121 ducked all the tough issues about implementing a top-two primary system in Arizona and dumped them into the Legislature’s lap.

It’s far from certain that the Legislature can develop a consensus on these issues, and far from clear what happens if it doesn’t.

Take Arizona’s system of public campaign financing for legislative candidates. It calls for candidates to get different amounts depending on whether they are running in a party primary or as an independent, whether they have primary opposition, and whether they are in a district in which one party has a sizeable registration advantage.

Under Proposition 121, these differentials would be unconstitutional. The Legislature will have to establish new public funding allotments. Moreover, since the public financing system was established by initiative, the Legislature will have to approve the new allotments by a three-quarters vote of both houses.

So, because of an initiative most legislators oppose (Proposition 121) they will have to achieve near unanimity on a rewrite of an initiative (public campaign financing) they have been trying to abolish. What are the odds of that happening?

The Legislature will have to establish new uniform signature requirements to qualify for the ballot, which currently differ among the parties and for independents. Higher numbers favor incumbents. Expect some controversy about this one.

Right now, state law gives established political parties copies of the voter file for free. The cost to other entities to obtain a copy is prohibitive. Candidates and others wanting lists of registered voters basically have to get them from the political parties.

Under Proposition 121, that preferential treatment of the political parties would be unconstitutional. But what’s the alternative?

The voter file includes a lot of personal information about voters. Is the entire file to be made available to every candidate who runs for office? And if access to more limited contact information is to be made available, by whom? The secretary of state and the county recorders aren’t set up to be list vendors.

And what should be done about precinct committeemen, the people who run the established political parties? Under state law, they hold an elective state office. Under Proposition 121, all state elective offices are subject to the top-two primary, in which voters can participate irrespective of party affiliation.

Obviously, it would be inappropriate for Republicans to be voting on Democratic precinct committeemen or vice versa. But if the position of precinct committeeman is eliminated, how are legislative vacancies to be filled?

Right now, precinct committeemen in the district and of the same party as the person vacating the seat make nominations to the board of supervisors. If they don’t officially exist, where do nominees come from?

There is also a requirement that vacancies for U.S. Senate and state offices other than governor be filled by someone of the same political party. But under Proposition 121, candidates can make up their own party. If someone vacating the office ran as an “independent Republican” or a “free-beer party” candidate, what does it mean to replace him with someone of the same party?

And what happens if the Legislature can’t or won’t reach agreement on these and numerous other implementing details? How does a top-two primary election in 2014 get held?

These implementing details weren’t left open when Washington and California voters approved a top-two primary system. In Washington, it was a statutory initiative that dealt with them directly. In California, a constitutional amendment was referred to voters by the Legislature, which had already contingently enacted the necessary statutory changes.

To be fair, top-two primary advocates in Arizona were in a bind. A constitutional change was probably necessary and running both a constitutional and statutory initiative simultaneously would have been daunting.

Nevertheless, voters should be aware of the substantive and difficult issues Proposition 121 defers to the Legislature, particularly when one of the premises of the measure is that the current crop of legislators are a bunch of ne’er-do-wells.

(column for 10.3.12)