On June 1, the South Carolina Republican Party sued the South Carolina State Election Commission to obtain a closed primary for itself. South Carolina has never had registration by party, and has always had open primaries. Here is the party’s complaint. The case is Greenville County Republican Party v State of South Carolina and Hudgens, 6:10-cv-1407-HFF. It was assigned to Judge Henry F. Floyd, a Bush Jr. appointee.
The party argues that because South Carolina parties must pay for their own primaries for municipal office, at least parties should be able to limit their municipal primaries to persons who identify themselves as party members.
The weakness in the lawsuit, as applied to primaries for federal, state and county office, is that South Carolina permits parties to nominate by convention if they choose. The party’s complaint acknowledges that, so the complaint also attacks a state law that says if a party decides to hold a convention, it may only do so if three-fourths of the delegates to the convention vote in favor of nomination by convention. That part of the complaint seems strong, given the U.S. Supreme Court precedents that say parties have a right to make such decisions for themselves. But if the Court knocked out the three-fourths rule, that would weaken the part of the lawsuit that attempts to get a closed primary.
This saddens me immensely as a former resident of SC.
How do they propose to close the primary without registration by party?
On another note, “The State” newspaper has editorialized against H 3746, and has asked the governor to veto it.
Sorry…here’s the link:
http://www.thestate.com/2010/06/03/1314135_reject-attempt-to-blackball-petition.html
Another weakness is that the South Carolina Republican Party apparently has not adopted a rule for a closed primary. That was the reason that the 5th circuit dismissed Mississippi Democratic Party v. Barbour.
Virginia, which, like SC, is part of the 4th circuit, also has nominating option(s) other than the party primary. In Miller v. Cunningham, which was brought by a local unit of the VA Republican Party, the 4th circuit said that, when a party is forced to nominate by primary, the party– not the state– decides who is eligible to vote in that primary. The court reasoned that, if a party wanted a closed process, it could nominate by a method other than the primary.
Idaho Republican Party v. Ysursa, which is pending in US district court, would seem to have better potential for prompting the US Supreme Court to strike down the state-mandated open primary.
#2: If the party wanted to block independents as well as Democrats from voting in GOP primaries, party registration would be the only practical way of identifying independents, so the state legislature would have to enact party registration. However, if the Republicans only wanted to block Democrats, that could be done without party registration.
Which cities in SC still have partisan elections? I found a couple of articles from a couple of years ago in cities that were considering switching to non-partisan elections (Aiken and Florence) that said that there were only 8 cities with partisan elections. Charleston, Columbia, and Spartanburg appear to have nonpartisan elections.
It seems that a lot of the plaintiffs “grievances” is related to how municipal party primaries are conducted, and the fact that South Carolina has not bothered to clean up some laws that are used by few cities. The easier solution would be to add the City of Greenville as a defendant and force them to pay for the municipal primary.
The MORON courts have apparently NOT been able to detect that —
Nominations for PUBLIC offices by PUBLIC Electors is PUBLIC business — and NOT the business of PRIVATE groups calling themselves *political parties*.
I.E. for all MORONS (especially SCOTUS MORONS) —
the State can dictate how such PUBLIC nominations are made by such PUBLIC Electors — by ALL voters or by SOME voters (with the various combinations of partisan and independent Electors).
SOOOOOO difficult to understand.
P.R. and App.V. = NO primaries are needed.
Nominations by equal nominating petitions (by all Electors).
The New Age partisan registration Elector lists are New Age PURGE lists — loved by those Stalin and Hitler clones.