The Washington Secretary of State, Kim Wyman, is trying to persuade the legislature to pass SB 5978. See this story. The bill moves the presidential primary from May to the second Tuesday in March. It also requires the major parties to reveal by November of the year before the election whether they will make use of their presidential primaries, or whether caucuses will choose delegates. Although the presidential primary law has been in the books for several decades, the state didn’t hold presidential primaries in 2012 because both major parties used caucuses instead.
SB 5978 also provides that voters would need to declare a party preference in order to vote in a presidential primary.
The article makes sense. A presidential preference primary will bring millions of dollars to a state and it will help the economy.
I know a lot of Ballot Access News readers think I am a socialist, but I do understand how economies operate. Whether fiat money or real money, the more of it that is injected into an economy benefits everybody.
If the government had put 1.7 trillion dollars into Obama’s original Stimulus Plan, then it might have gotten our economy recovered sooner. 700 billion was simply not enough. The more money people have to spend, the more taxes are collected, and everyone benefits. If the greedy capitalists get too greedy, then Congress has to apply the brakes with Price Controls that are really effective – like prison terms of 30 to 50 years for those who violate them.
I trust this bill is passed into law and Washington State gets it presidential primary. It will be good for everybody.
The Washington presidential primary was passed by the initiative process in 1988. The intent of the initiative was written into statute. SB 5976 edits some of that language, in amusing ways.
It also was written before widespread by-mail balloting was used, and it was assumed that a voter would be able to select a partisan ballot at their polling place. Washington does not have party registration, and under the blanket primary had not required public affiliation. But under the initiative, voters would be able to request a party ballot by signing a pledge, otherwise they would be given a ballot with all major party candidates on it. The ballots were counted separately.
The initiative was quite specific about how national delegates were to be allocated, but that is impossible to enforce on the parties, so now they get to decide whether they are going to use the primary results.
In 2000 and 2008, the Democrats ostensibly ignored the primary, while gladly accepting the list of voters who affiliated with them. In 2004 and 2012, the primary was temporarily canceled by a Democratic-controlled legislature.
The new bill is clumsily written, but it appears to require both (sic) major parties to agree to use the primary results or the primary would become a non-partisan beauty contest.