The Delaware House passed HB 245 unanimously back on June 29, 2009. It will soon receive a hearing in the Senate Insurance and Elections Committee. Among other things, it increases the number of registered voters to qualify as a political party from approximately 300 registered members, to approximately 600.

Specifically, the bill changes the percentage of registered voters from one-twentieth of 1% of the state total, to one-tenth of 1% of the state total.

In 2008, Delaware had 7 qualified minor parties, and they had this number of registered voters just prior to the general election: Independent Party 1,308; Libertarian 756; Working Families 589; Green 587; Blue Enigma 330; Socialist Workers 310; Constitution 309.

Delaware does not post the number of registered voters for the qualified minor parties on its webpage, and today is a holiday and the State Election office is closed, so it isn’t possible to know how many registrants each party now has.

The bill was suggested by the State Election Commissioner. The sponsors are three Democrats: Senator George Bunting of Bethany Beach, Rep. Earl Jacques of Newark, and Rep. Hazel Plant of Wilmington. The bill makes many other election law changes. It also requires that qualified minor parties nominate via convention, and not just with a meeting of the state executive committee. In 2008 the Independent Party of Delaware had nominated Ralph Nader and its nominees for other office with a state executive committee meeting. Someone had challenged the Independent Party’s nomination procedure, but a court said there is nothing in the law to forbid using a committee meeting instead of a convention to nominate candidates.

The Durango, Colorado Herald of January 17 has this story about the pending lawsuit against a Colorado law that keeps independent candidates off the ballot if they have been registered members of a political party during the 17 months before the election. This case, Riddle v Secretary of State, has received far more publicity than most ballot access lawsuits do. Generally newspapers don’t cover such lawsuits until there is a decision.

In October 2003, California held a recall election to determine if Governor Gray Davis should be recalled. As is normal in California recall elections, the same ballot asking voters to vote “Yes” or “No” on the recall also had a separate section, holding an election for the office, just in case the voters vote “Yes” on recall. That election was conducted with a single ballot that carried the names of all candidates, and all voters received an identical ballot. No majority was required to elect. It is not possible to know exactly how the members of any particular party voted, but it is possible to make an estimate.

The California October 2003 ballot is famous for having 135 candidates listed for Governor to replace Davis. Arnold Schwarzenegger won that election, with 4,206,284 votes. His nearest Republican competitor, Tom McClintock, only got 1,161,287 votes. The ballot carried party labels, and Schwarzenegger had “Republican” next to his name.

Recently a proponent of the “top-two open primary” ballot measure, set for the June 2010 ballot, wrote an op-ed that appeared in at least three newspapers. Here is the version that appeared in La Prensa, which is identical to the version that appeared in the Grass Valley Union and the Santa Ynez Valley Journal. It says “In the 2003 recall, an election very similar to how the new open primary would work, independent voters elected Arnold Schwarzenegger, a man who could never have won a Republican primary.”

A look at the 2003 election results shows that this claim is not true. In October 2003, 35.30% of the registered voters were Republicans, according to the Secretary of State’s registration tally for that election. Assuming that registered Republicans turned out in the same proportion as other voters, that means that 3,056,210 registered Republicans voted. In reality, the number was probably higher, because Republicans in California traditionally have higher turnout than other voters.

Now assume that the Republican candidates for Governor, other than Schwarzenegger, received all their votes only from registered Republicans. There were 1,229,240 votes for these anti-Schwarzenegger Republican candidates. That still leaves 1,826,970 registered Republican voters who must have voted either for Schwarzenegger, or for a Democrat, a minor party member, or an independent candidate. The only minor party or independent candidates who received as much as 15,000 votes were Peter Camejo of the Green Party (who got 242,247 votes) and Arianna Huffington, an independent (who got 47,505 votes). Even if 600,000 of the registered Republicans voted for a Democrat or for a minor party candidate (which is wildly unlikely), that means that at least 1,226,970 registered Republicans voted for Schwarzenegger. So, Schwarzenegger would have defeated Tom McClintock and all the other Republicans, even in a closed Republican primary, in 2003.

Proponents of the “top-two open primary” in California, in their writings so far, have not applied analytical rigor. No commentary yet published in California in favor of that system has yet mentioned that two states have already tried the system. One would think, if one were advocating an idea that had already been tried in two other states, one would point to what has actually happened in those other two states to validate one’s claims.