California Top Two Open Primary Builds Support in Idaho

OPEN PRIMARIES

• Editorial, Other Views: Open primaries: What about will of the people? (EDITORIAL The Californian.com) Last June, California voters approved Proposition 14, which promised to promote competition in state politics by listing all candidates for a given office on a single primary ballot, regardless of party affiliation. The top-two vote-getters would advance to the November runoff — an arrangement that proponents believe will benefit more moderate candidates and help create a less polarized, more stalemate-resistant Legislature.
• Candidate's Request to Suspend Election Rules Denied; Certified List of 16 - U.S. District Judge Otis Wright II denies request to suspend new election rules in upcoming 36th Congressional District contest. (By Paul Chavez, HERMOSA BEACH PATCH)
• Has time come for a ‘top two’ primary system? (EDITORIAL Bonner County Daily Bee) Disenfranchising voters is never a good thing. Which is why it’s time to end Idaho’s rigid party system, which favors the Republican and Democrat parties. Instead, let’s switch to a “top two” primary system like that adopted by Washington voters in 2004 and which has successfully run in Louisiana for years. A similar system, through Proposition 14, was adopted recently in California.
• First GOP presidential debate opening. (South Carolina SC) A group of independent voters, party members of black tea and state legislators have joined in the fight against the trial.
• Senate approves new primary plan with party registration (By Brad Iverson-Long, Idaho Reporter) “This is not a closed primary bill – it provides options,” said Senate President Pro Tem Brent Hill, R-Rexburg. “It’s a constitutional primary bill.” The new primary system follows a successful lawsuit by the Idaho Republican Party striking down Idaho’s existing open primary election system.

MIDDLE AMERICA, THIRD PARTIES, INDEPENDENT CANDIDATES

• King: Great middle of America has no place to call home (By BILL KING, Chron/Viewpoints, Outlook) Still, it is not easy to break the Democratic/Republican partisan oligarchy. The two dominant political parties have laced the elections statutes with provisions that stack the deck against third-party or independent candidates. For example, in Texas an independent candidate must collect about 50,000 signatures to get on the November ballot and the petitioners cannot have voted in the primary, a daunting task to say the least.
• Former independent candidate for governor forms moderate political action committee (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The Republic - Columbus Indiana) Former Maine independent candidate for governor Eliot Cutler has formed a new political action committee for moderates.

LAST WORD

• PPP sells to left, polls down middle (By MOLLY BALL, Politico) The company’s revenue comes not from the polls featured in news stories but from paying clients: Democratic candidates and progressive advocacy groups such as unions, abortion rights groups and environmentalists. The liberal website Daily Kos, with sponsorship from the Service Employees International Union, has commissioned more than 100 PPP polls to be conducted and published over the course of the 2012 election cycle. But that’s the exception, not the rule, to how the company usually makes its money.