The price of California’s budget: Part 2

Also see parts 1 and 3.

There is much I don’t understand about SCA 4, not the least of which is how this subsection is not invalidated by its own internal contradictions:

(b) Top Two Candidate Open Primary. All registered voters otherwise qualified to vote shall be guaranteed the unrestricted right to vote for the candidate of their choice in all state and congressional elections. All candidates for a given state or congressional office shall be listed on a single primary ballot. The top two candidates, as determined by the voters in an open primary, shall advance to a general election in which the winner shall be the candidate receiving the greatest number of votes cast in an open general election.

It seems to me that guaranteeing my unrestricted right to vote for the candidate of my choice in “all state and congressional elections” means that all the candidates selected by their parties’ voters in the primary process should be on the November ballot, as they are now. In his emailed response to my question about this, Richard Winger, editor of Ballot Access News, said, “The provision you quote can only be meaningful if it dictates write-in space on both the June ballot and the November ballot.” More about write-ins later.

There is nothing in either the US or California constitutions that defines what an election is, but in common parlance it is taken to mean any event that enables you to cast a vote. And the website definitions.uslegal.com seems to concur that a primary and general are two separate elections, not two parts of one election, which might open the constitutional amendment up to legal challenges even before it gets on the ballot: http://definitions.uslegal.com/p/primary-election/

A primary election is one in which the candidates for a particular office are chosen. After the preliminary primary election, a general election is held to fill the office with one of the candidates chosen in the primary election.

In the ABC interview I link to in Part 1, Schwarzenegger refers to the upcoming March 3 mayoral race in Los Angeles, where incumbent Villaraigosa is running against nine other candidates. Under the CA Constitution, all judicial, school, county, and city offices are nonpartisan and have been so since the constitution was adopted in 1879. In fact, the example Schwarzenegger uses of a mayoral election is fundamental to understanding how this will play out in the coming months.

In December 1999, a run-off election for mayor of San Francisco was held, made necessary because incumbent Willie Brown had secured less than the 50 percent of the vote required to win election outright in the mayoral contest held in November. Brown’s unsuccessful opponent in the run-off was a write-in candidate on the November ballot, Tom Ammiano, who now represents District 13 (part of San Francisco) in the California State Assembly. Ammiano had secured 25 percent of the vote in the November election in a field of 18 candidates that included three other write-ins; Willie Brown had received only 39 percent.

In 2002, the California Supreme Court made a ruling about providing write-in space on ballots in response to a lawsuit that arose from that 1999 election, and that ruling effectively declared that run-offs (as Schwarzenegger/Maldonado are now proposing a general election should be) “are just the second part of one election”, according to Winger.

So what might my June 2012 primary ballot look like? Not unlike the ballot for the recall race in October 2003 that elected Arnold Schwarzenegger as California’s Governor, except that it won’t have the recall question on it, and there’ll be more than one contest.

More than 160 candidates ran for Governor in 2003, 26 of them as write-in candidates. Five candidates withdrew—most egregiously, “Democrat” Arianna Huffington after early voting had begun and she’d taken about 44,000 votes away from others. In candidate debates, she had played foil to her friend Arnold so effectively that even though minor party candidates were included in the debates, they got little time to speak because the Arnie-Arianna inane sparring was considered “good television” and the moderator didn’t cut it off. (Just slipped that in because it shows there’s more than one way to exclude minor party candidates from debates.)

If the constitutional amendment is approved by voters, the November 2012 general election ballot will have only two names listed for each office and there might be no line for the voter to vote for a write-in because of the 2002 ruling mentioned above, which limits write-ins to the first round of elections only. Furthermore, as Steven Hill of the New America Foundation noted in a Los Angeles Times op-ed last week:

“In a very liberal district, say an urban area like Los Angeles, the top two candidates in November likely would be two Democrats; in a conservative district, the top two probably would be Republicans. Third-party candidates and independents almost never would appear on the November ballot.”

Political parties already have problems with “mystery” candidates whose names appear in their primary contests, as highlighted by this story in Ballot Access News about mystery Green Party primary candidates in Florida. It seems likely that shenanigans will abound even more under Maldonado’s proposed system.

In the third part of this post, I will quote extensively from Winger’s analytical assessment of this legislation’s likely effects. He provided me with an advance copy of the article on the subject that will appear in the March 2009 edition of BAN.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

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