On June 6, 1972, the California voters passed Proposition 4, which appeared on the ballot in this way: “Presidential Primary. Requires primary election wherein all recognized candidates for president are on ballot unless affidavit declaring non-candidacy is filed.”
The state legislature had placed that proposition on the ballot because it wanted the voters to be able to vote for all presidential candidates who were plainly seeking the nomination of one of the ballot-qualified parties. Before Proposition 4, sometimes leading presidential candidates would abstain from running in the California primary for political reasons. For example, John F. Kennedy did not file for the 1960 California Democratic presidential primary because he did not want to offend then-Governor Pat Brown, who was on the Democratic presidential primary ballot as a “favorite son”, meaning he could control the California Democratic delegation and make deals with the bona fide candidates at the convention.
On July 22, 2019, the Independent Voters Project, a leading proponent of the California top-two system, filed a lawsuit in Superior Court in San Bernardino County, arguing that Proposition 4 really means that California cannot hold a presidential primary unless all presidential candidates are on a single ballot, including independent candidates; and that all voters must be able to vote on that ballot, regardless of how they are registered. Boydston v Padilla, civ-ds-1921480.
Here is the portion of the California Constitution that Proposition 4 added. See section 5(c). The attorneys for the Independent Voters Project have seized on the accident that the legislators who wrote Proposition 4 used the words “open primary”. However, if one reads the full sentence that contains those two words, it is obvious that to the authors of Proposition 4, “open primary” was just the term to use for a primary that included all candidates. The term had nothing to do with who can vote in any particular primary. The Independent Voters Project complaint avoids quoting the full sentence in section 5(c). Instead, it only quotes the first half of the sentence.
The Independent Voters Project complaint says, “The presidential primary is an important stage of the public election process. It is the method through which voters decide which presidential candidates will appear on November’s ballot.” This is obviously untrue. In 2008, Hillary Clinton won the California Democratic presidential primary, but her name did not appear on the November ballot.
