Montana Republican Party Moves Ahead with Lawsuit Against Open Primary for Public Office Nominations

The Montana Republican Party’s lawsuit against Montana’s open primary is active. The case was filed on September 8, 2014, and argued that the Republican Party cannot be forced to let members of other parties help choose its nominees for public office or party office.

The case had been diverted for a while because the party had decided the strongest part of its case concerned the law that forced the party to choose party officers in an open primary. However on May 5, 2015, a new law was enacted that says parties no longer need to use the primary to choose party officers. All sides agree that the part of the lawsuit concerning election of party officers is now moot.

But the party is pursuing the other part of the lawsuit, concerning nominations for public office. On June 4 the Republican Party identified the political science experts it will be relying on to show that non-members have been voting in Republican Party primaries. The state will identify its experts on July 14. The case is Ravalli County Republican Central Committee v McCulloch, 6:14cv-58. The state Republican Party is a co-plaintiff, along with ten county parties.


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Montana Republican Party Moves Ahead with Lawsuit Against Open Primary for Public Office Nominations — 4 Comments

  1. This is a two way street in some Counties where Republicans attempted to take over the Democratic Central Committee in Montana’a Ravalli County, just a few years ago. There were a number of Republicans running as Democrats that year in Ravalli County for the legislature. Republicans may want to limit who can vote in their primary but still want all of us to pay for their beauty contest.

  2. The SCOTUS morons messed up the stuff in the 2000 CA Donkey case.

    PUBLIC nominations for PUBLIC offices by PUBLIC Electors according to PUBLIC LAWS.

    NO primaries.

    P.R. and nonpartisan App.V.

  3. Kyle Saunders was an expert witness for the State of Idaho in the Idaho case (‘Ysursa’), where he essentially won the case for the Beckites. The plaintiff’s evidence in that case was very weak, and included some data that didn’t have all the votes.

    Saunders had explained that some voters identified as Republican, but were not philosophically aligned; and that other voters identified as independent, but were philosophically aligned, and almost always voted for Republican candidates.

    Thus, there would be voters who would have no problem registering as a Republican, vote in a closed primary, and then vote against the nominees in the fall; while at the same time they would exclude voters, who would say that they vote for the individual and not the party, but would nevertheless choose the candidates who happened to be Republican, because they liked them personally or agreed with them on the issues. Neither of these two groups could be considered cross-overs.

    Saunders conceded that there might be some cross-overs, and that is what the judge based his decision on.

  4. The evidence from Ravalli County is of dubious value, and actually argues for implementation of Top 2.

    While it is true that more votes were cast in the state senate primary in SD-43 than in the two federal races, even more votes were cast in the county commissioners races.

    After a previous county treasurer resigned, the county commissioner appointed an interim treasurer. It later was found that the interim treasurer had skipped town on a civil judgment in South Carolina, and had been fired from her previous position in Missoula. The staff at the treasurer’s office was resigning because of the toxic work environment. The interim treasurer was placed on paid administrative leave. After she was removed from office, she apparently left Montana. This spring, the county was trying to figure out if they could afford a process server to hunt her down vs. the chances of ever recovering any money.

    The blowback against the county commissioners who had appointed her was severe. In the Republican primary one received 27.8%, and the other 14.6% in a three-way race. A third, who had been appointed to fill a vacancy on the commission barely survived with 51.7% of the vote, and faced a much more challenging race in the general election than the two challengers who had turned out the incumbents in the primary.

    The interim treasurer received 4.3% of the primary vote in her effort to be nominated. More votes were cast in the county treasurers race than either of the two federal races.

    It was not a case of sneaky Democrats – it was a case of throwing the bums out.

    The SD-43 primary pitted the “incumbent” Scott Boulanger who had been appointed by the county commissioners to fill a senate vacancy. His opponent Pat Connell was a state representative, who had defeated Boulanger in a primary in 2012. Since Boulanger had been appointed by the same county commissioners who had appointed the failed interim treasurer, he was tainted. In addition, he had lost another legislative election to Connell in 2012.

    The Republicans received about 2/3 of the Ravalli county vote for the federal offices in 2014. If you don’t vote in the Republican primary for partisan county offices, there is really no point in voting.

    We can compare the ratio of the SD-43 votes cast to the US senate votes cast in the primary (the reverse rolloff ratio) to other metrics on a precinct-by-precinct basis.

    For example, we can compare the reverse rolloff ratio to the Democratic vote in the US senate race in November. Correlation between these two factors was negative. That is, where Democrats are stronger, such as in Hamilton, there was less reverse rolloff.

    If we compare the reverse rolloff ratio to the Libertarian vote in November, there is a positive relationship. The highest reverse rolloff was in Darby, Boulanger’s home. In addition, there is a positive relationship between the support for Matt Rosendale in the US House primary and the reverse rolloff ration. Rosendale who lost the primary, was senate majority leader in 2015, and has submitted an affidavit that some Republican senators, including Pat Connell, did not always march lockstep with the party leaders.

    So there is actually stronger evidence of right wing elements only voting for certain candidates that they believed to be conservatively pure enough, and not of Democratic interlopers.

    Another interesting result was the votes cast in the three county commissioner races. Ravalli County has five commissioners who serve for four years, and the other two districts were not up in 2014.

    While commissioners must live in their district, votes are cast countywide. Nonetheless, there was a slight tendency for voters to only vote for the commissioner from their area. They might have believed they were restricted to voting for “their” commissioner. Or they may have exercised personal restraint, or perhaps were less knowledgeable about the area at the opposite end of the county.

    Most of the population is concentrated along the Bitterroot River, with most of the area in national forests on either side of the valley. Commissioner District 1 is in the north, with Commissioner District 5 (the districts form a north to south stack). Election precincts are numbered from 1 to 24, south to north.

    Comparing votes cast in the District 1 primary to those in the District 5 primary, the ratio was lower in the south (eg 0.949 in Precinct 1), and higher in the north (eg 1.050 in Precinct 24). That is, voters in the north were more likely to vote for a candidate in the northern district (or less likely to vote for a candidate in southern district) and vice versa.

    Correlation between the ratio of votes cast (District 5/District 1) and the precinct number is 0.768.

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