Richard Winger Appears on C-SPAN
Shortly after midnight on Wednesday-- early Thursday morning-- I was channel surfing and happened to catch a re-run of Richard Winger's appearance on C-SPAN.
This was a pleasant surprise to me, since Richard has modestly neglected to mention this interview on his website, Ballot Access News.
I was also surprised to hear Richard say that he favors partisan elections for city offices. His state of California has had nonpartisan elections-- popularly called "open primaries"-- for municipal and county offices for almost 100 years.
In a partisan election system, of course, each party is empowered to place a candidate for every office on the general election ballot.
posted by Steve Rankin | 7:14 AM
2 Comments:
When asked about successful independent and 3rd party candidates, he failed to note that independents hold the balance of power in the Louisiana House (nor the overall success of independents under Louisiana's Open Primary).
He also failed to mention how Louisiana had solved the problem of getting ballots to overseas and military voters, through the use of conditional ballots for the runoff. This is much easier to do when all voters may vote for all candidates on the ballot. Other states are forced to move their primary elections earlier and earlier. This is likely to indirectly lead to harder ballot access through earlier filing deadlines - just as the Australian ballot has resulted in harder ballot access.
What success? Louisiana has used the "top two open primary" since 1975 and has never elected any independents to the US Congress or any statewide office.
All of Louisiana's state legislative seats will be up for election in 2011, and we'll see how many independents are elected then.
The only other states that have the "top two open primary" for congressional and all state elections are Washington and California. Since these two states, unlike Louisiana, ALWAYS have a runoff, there is less, if any, need for conditional ballots.
Please expand on your statement about the Australian ballot.
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