Mark Kimble, a member of the Arizona Citizens Clean Election Commission, has this op-ed in opposition to letting any party have the word “independent” in its name.
The term “independent voter” does not appear in Arizona law or on official Arizona forms. The voter registration form does not mention “independent”. It asks people if they wish to register in any of these four categories: Republican, Democratic, other, or “No party/unaffiliated”. Also, the voter registration statistics published on the Secretary of State’s website do not refer to “independent voters”. The data shows the number of registered voters in each qualified political party, and then a category called “other.”
The election law does not mention “independent candidates.” Article 5 is titled “Nomination other than by primary”, and the text begins with these words: “Any qualified elector who is not a registered member of a political party that is recognized pursuant to this title may be nominated as a candidate for public office otherwise than by primary elecion or by party committee pursuant to this section.”
Nor does the law dictate that a candidate nominated otherwise than by primary automatically has “independent” as his or her party label. The section of the law that describes the ballot, 16-502, says “The names of all candidates nominated under 16-341 shall be placed in a single column below that of the registered parties. Next to the name of each candidate shall be printed the designation not to exceed three words in length.” In other words, someone who qualifies for the November ballot by petition is free to choose any short partisan label that doesn’t mimic the name of a qualified party; the candidate is not required to use “independent”. An example of a partisan label used in Arizona in the recent past is “Natural Law”, when some supporters of the Natural Law Party qualified to run for Arizona legislature before the Natural Law Party finally gained qualified status in Arizona in 2000.
A party might want to hold itself out as an organization for people who don’t like any of the older, established parties. Many of these people might want to be part of an organization with that stance on politics. That is why there have been many one-state parties that not only used the word “independent” in their name; their entire name was simply “Independent Party.” Parties called the “Independent Party” have been ballot-qualified in the past, or currently, in Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, Maryland, Oregon, South Carolina, and Utah. Also Massachusetts had a ballot-qualified party named the “Independent Voters Party” 1991-1992.
The term “independent voter” was not used in the United States until political scientists started using the term in the late 1950’s.
In 1906-1910 there was a nationally-organized party named the “Independence Party”, supported by William Randolph Hearst. Thus, the practice of using a word strongly connected to the word “independent” is far older than using the term “independent voter”.
