Initiative 872 hopes to change history

Grange-backed crusade wanting to bring Louisiana style primary to state, doing away with current Montana system

Initiative 872 hopes to write the last chapter of a saga that changed the history of elections in the state.

The initiative would replace the current Montana primary elections system, where people can vote for only one partisan ballot or for a nonpartisan ballot, with the Top-Two system, where people can vote across party lines, sending the top two vote-getters into the general election, regardless of party.

Until this year and for the past seven decades the state had held blanket primaries, where people could vote across party lines, until the blanket primary was declared unconstitutional.

Grant County members of the Washington State Grange, the organization from which the blanket primary originated, believe that people should have a right to choose who represents them. Hence the reason they support the Top-Two primary.

"Our membership wants to be able to vote for the person and not for the party," said Genevieve Underwood, Grange deputy for Grant County.

People get mad, she said, when they go to the polls and find out they can't vote for who they want, as they could with the old blanket primary.

Underwood said there were several misconceptions people have about the Top-Two primary.

First, she said that people believe that with the Top-Two primary, a widespread phenomenon of two people from the same party making it to the general election is going to happen, leaving voters with no real choice.

"That's not going to happen often at all," she said. "Only two to three percent of the cases, according to the research from the Secretary of State."

Underwood went as far as to say that the Top-Two primary makes candidates more competitive, turning out candidates work harder to make sure they get into the top two.

"We believe that is good," she said.

A second misconception is the belief that the Top-Two primary will lead to parties nominating their candidates. Not so, said Underwood, who said the parties would just be qualifying them.

The blanket primary was declared unconstitutional by California and Washington courts. Underwood said the proposed Top-Two primary will be drafted so that it passes constitutional muster. One of the things parties argued against the blanket system is that it interfered with the right to nominate one person for each party. That will not happen with the Top-Two, she said.

"We know (parties are going to challenge)," she said. "We say, let them challenge. I don't think they have a case."

She added that the Top-Two system is very similar to the old blanket primary. While the blanket system put the person from each party who received the most votes into the general election, the Top-Two system puts into the general ballot those two candidates with the most votes, regardless of party.

Underwood said she was optimistic about the result of the initiative. "Let people decide how they want to vote," she said. "Hopefully the governor will not overrule it."

On the other side of the spectrum is the League of Women Voters, the main force behind the No on I-872 campaign. The campaign's manager Richard Kelley said that the Top-Two primary, known also as the Louisiana system, would end the state's tradition of allowing minor parties and independent candidates to fair access to the general ballot.

"If you were set out to create the worst possible election system you possibly could, you could have come up with I-872," he said.

The reasons for this, he said, is because I-872 "sets out that there is never an independent party candidate, and sometimes the two candidates could be from the same party.

"This is not a good idea," he added.

Kelley believes if the Top-Two initiative passes, there would only be two candidates on every ballot every time," he said. "Which means there would never be a minor party candidate, and that quite often the two candidates would be from the same party."

This, Kelley said, would create a radical reaction of voter choice in the general election, as well as handing over a virtual duopoly to Republicans and Democrats, two of the four parties that have endorsed the campaign against I-872. The Green Party and the Libertarians have endorsed it as well.

The reason the minor parties have endorsed it, Kelley said, is because they don't believe they can continue to exist if the initiative passes.

"If you can't get your candidates on the ballot, you can't make it as a party."

I-872 would make the political system less competitive and it would take away the chance for voters to cast protest votes," he said.

"They will not be able to call the parties' bluff if they talk nonsense," he said, adding that this would hand total control to the major parties, which, he pointed out, don't believe themselves that that is a good idea.

Parties may be against I-872. Conversely, though, many elected officials have expressed their discomfort with the situation. On one hand the voters may be supporting I-872, while on the other, the parties they belong to are against it.

"Every elected official loves whatever system they got elected under," he said, explaining the support of I-872 by some representatives "They conceive that they have some magical connection with voters that expresses itself best in the way they got elected."

Voter turnover is not something that elected officials would have to fear in particular under the current Montana system, he said. "There was no more turnover in the primary last month than two or four years ago," he added.

Kelley refuted the belief that the Top-Two is similar to the blanket system, which he said the LWV would still support if it were constitutional.

"I-872 is not a blanket," he said. "In the way that people vote, it is completely different," he said.