If you want to close your elections, you should pay for them.
Over the last few days, it seems that momentum has picked up among Republicans for an initiative that would “close” primary elections—a move that would prohibit anyone but those registered to a specific party from voting in that party’s primary elections.
Registered Republicans could only vote in the Republican primary. Registered Democrats could only vote in the Democratic primary. Independents and other third-party voters would be, as they say, SOL.
That means thousands upon thousands of legal, registered voters in the state of Alabama would effectively be disenfranchised. Shut out of the voting process.
In some cases, because of Alabama’s gerrymandered districts that discourage participation by both parties, it would mean that voters in the districts where only one party’s candidates qualify to run would have absolutely no say in who represents them.
A House district of 40,000-plus people would, by law, be exclusively decided by less than a third of the population in some cases. For an Alabama Senate district, that means fewer than half of the more than 130,000 people would even have an opportunity to vote in a primary.
And given the current state of the Republican Party in Alabama, that’s quite the power grab.
As it currently stands, a small committee within the party is actively choosing who has to abide by laws and rules and who gets arbitrarily booted from the ballot. The guy at the top of the ticket quite clearly does not meet the requirements to run, but the party’s steering committee booted off two down-ballot candidates for simply having distant ties to Democrats.
That’s not democracy. That’s not representative government.
That’s government officials picking their voters, instead of the other way around.
Look, we all know what’s happening here. A handful of far-right Republicans lost elections because a more moderate Republican candidate appealed to the non-registered Republican voting base of a district and received “outside” support that boosted them to a win.
Yeah, that’s how elections work.
If you’re in a district in which there is no second-party candidate, those voters—those citizens of the district—should absolutely have the right to choose the candidate who best represents their interests. The person who best represents the MAJORITY of the districts.
Why is this such a foreign concept to Republicans?
If your policies aren’t attracting voters, change your policies. Soften your positions. Meet the people where they are on the big issues. Or drop out of the race.
But all across America, it seems, that’s not what Republicans are doing. We are going through an unheard-of redrawing of voting maps in heavy-Republican states, at the behest of the felon who resides in the White House, in an attempt to tamp down what is shaping up to be an absolute bloodbath for Republicans in the midterms.
At the same time, Republicans are trying like hell to pass the biggest voter suppression laws since Jim Crow, with the SAVE Act. That worthless piece of legislation, which would do nothing to address voter fraud or election security, would be the largest poll tax imposed on American citizens in the country’s history, thanks to its absurdly limited and expensive ID requirements.
All of that is on top of state-level voting restrictions that attack mail-in ballots (zero evidence of fraud) and early voting (zero evidence of fraud) and absentee ballot availability (zero evidence of fraud).
And now, Alabama Republicans, in addition to its other never-ending attempts to limit voting access, want to close primaries.
If that’s what you want, you should, at the very least, be forced to pay for it. Because why in the hell are all of the rest of us—a clear majority of the state, by the way—paying for an election in which we are barred by law from participating?
Elections, especially statewide ones, cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. The 2022 midterm elections in Alabama cost taxpayers somewhere in the neighborhood of $12-$15 million. Each primary cost about $6 million.
Any party that wishes to close its primary elections to legally registered voters in this state should be required to foot the full bill of conducting that election.
But even that wouldn’t erase the anti-democracy, anti-American stench from it.
