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Initiative 872 was a 2004 ballot initiative that replaced the open primary being used in Washington state with a top-two nonpartisan blanket primary. It was challenged in court up to the US Supreme Court, which upheld the top-two primary in Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party. [2]
The blanket primary in Washington State was started by an Initiative to the Legislature filed in 1934 and passed in 1935. The political parties in Washington tried numerous times to have an open or closed primary system implemented, and it even filed a lawsuit that was decided by the Washington State Supreme Court in 1936. The state was represented in that lawsuit by Warren Magnuson.
The political parties in Washington State filed another lawsuit against it in 2000 when the blanket primary in California was overturned by California Democratic Party v. Jones and won the case.
The Washington State Legislature passed a new primary system in 2004, which would have created a new top-two primary system, with an open primary as a backup, giving the Governor the option to choose. Secretary of State Sam Reed advocated for the top-two, but on April 1, 2004, the Governor used the line-item veto to activate the open primary instead. [3]
Initiative 872 was filed on January 8, 2004, by Terry Hunt from the Washington Grange. The language of the ballot measure summary was as follows:
This measure proposes a new system for conducting primaries for partisan offices. This proposal continues current practice of permitting voters to vote for any candidate for any office in primary and general elections, without limitation based on party. The two "top" candidates with the most votes in the primary advance to the general election. Candidates continue to designate their party. It becomes effective only if the court decision invalidating the traditional blanket primary becomes final.
The political parties in Washington opposed I-872 because they felt it would create an opportunity for someone not directly associated with the party to claim the party name on the ballot.
The measure passed with 1,632,225 yes votes and 1,095,190 no votes in 2004. [4]
On July 15, 2005, the initiative 872 was declared unconstitutional by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
On March 18, 2008, the US Supreme Court reversed the decision and upheld 872. [5]
The decision to uphold 872 changed the implementation of the 2008 primary election, which was held on August 19.
In 2008, two State Senate races and five House of Representatives elections had either two Democrats or two Republicans get through the primary election, appearing together on the general election ballot.
The results of a study from Gonzaga University comparing the results in Washington state between the 2004 (closed) and 2008 (top two) primaries, indicate that the top two primary overall reduced the likelihood of running against a same party candidate and it reduced the likelihood that a strong incumbent would face a challenger from his or her own party.
Party primaries or primary elections are elections in which a political party selects a candidate for an upcoming general election. Depending on the country and administrative division, there may be an "open primary", in which all voters are eligible to participate, or a "closed primary", in which only members of supporters of a political party can vote. There are also other variants of primary elections worldwide. Electoral systems using first-past-the-post voting for both primaries and the general election are sometimes described as using plurality-with-primaries, to highlight the structural and behavioral similarity of such systems to the plurality-with-runoff system.
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Ballot access are rules and procedures regulating the right to candidacy, the conditions under which a candidate, political party, or ballot measure is entitled to appear on voters' ballots in elections in the United States. The jurisprudence of the right to candidacy and right to create a political party are less clear than voting rights in the United States. However, the U.S. Supreme Court has established in multiple cases that the federal constitution does not recognize a fundamental right to candidacy, and that state governments have a legitimate government interest in blocking "frivolous or fraudulent candidacies". As election processes are decentralized by Article I, Section 4, of the United States Constitution, ballot access laws are established and enforced by the states. As a result, ballot access processes may vary from one state to another. State access requirements for candidates generally pertain to personal qualities of a candidate, such as: minimum age, residency, and citizenship. Additionally, many states require prospective candidates to collect a specified number of qualified voters' signatures on petitions of support and mandate the payment of filing fees before granting access; ballot measures are similarly regulated. Each state also regulates how political parties qualify for automatic ballot access, and how those minor parties that do not can. Fundamental to democracy, topics related to ballot access are the subject of considerable debate in the United States.
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California Democratic Party v. Jones, 530 U.S. 567 (2000), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court held that California's blanket primary violates a political party's First Amendment freedom of association.
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The blanket primary is a system used for selecting political party candidates in a primary election, used in Argentina and historically in the United States. In a blanket primary, voters may pick one candidate for each office without regard to party lines; for instance, a voter might select a Democratic candidate for governor and a Republican candidate for senator. In a traditional blanket primary the candidates with the highest number of votes for each office in each party advance to the general election, as the respective party's nominee. Blanket primaries differ from open primaries – in open primaries voters may pick candidates regardless of their own party registration, but may only choose among candidates from a single party of the voter's choice. A blanket primary gives registered voters maximum choice in selecting candidates among those systems that separate primary from general elections. Blanket primary elections also serve as polls for the general elections, revealing the portion of votes that the candidates are expected to receive in them.
An open primary is a primary election that does not require voters to be affiliated with a political party in order to vote for partisan candidates. In a traditional open primary, voters may select one party's ballot and vote for that party's nomination. As in a closed primary, the highest voted candidate in each party then proceeds to the general election. In a nonpartisan blanket primary, all candidates appear on the same ballot and the two highest voted candidates proceed to the runoff election, regardless of party affiliation. The constitutionality of this system was affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States in Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party in 2008, whereas a partisan blanket primary was previously ruled to be unconstitutional in 2000. The arguments for open primaries are that voters can make independent choices, building consensus that the electoral process is not splintered or undermined by the presence of multiple political parties.
A nonpartisan blanket primary is a primary election in which all candidates for the same elected office run against each other at once, regardless of the political party. Partisan elections are, on the other hand, segregated by political party. Nonpartisan blanket primaries are slightly different from the two-round system in that the first round takes place alongside other primary elections, and the second round is never skipped.
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