The Washington state primary is coming up on August 19. This excites me far more than the Presidential primaries and caucuses that swept through months ago.
One interesting point is that this year, Washington has switched to a Top 2 primary, in which the two candidates with the most votes will advance to the general election for a single open position, regardless of their stated party affiliation. It also means that the individual parties don't hold their own public primaries, which means that the candidates for each office haven't necessarily been fully vetted against their peers. This means there are offices for which dozens of Democrats and Republicans are squaring off against each other—and against a bunch of independents1.
So, that will be interesting.
There's only one ballot initiative this time around: Initiative 26, to make a handful of currently partisan offices (county executive, county assessor, and county councilors) non-partisan. Even though this will hide each candidate's party affiliation at election time, I think it's a good idea—local politics are too nuanced and close-quarters for voters to be blindly following party lines. I admit that affiliation often sneaks into non-partisan offices, but I think that making these non-partisan is a step in the right direction in making office holders more accountable to their constituency than to their party.
In related news, I got a mailer the other day from furniture magnate Tom Udall who, despite my Washington mailing address, still mails me about talks on the NMT campus. It's not completely out of the realm of the reasonable that I would be interested, but it nevertheless makes me chuckle.
1 only some are nutjobs.
So if the Republicans and the Democrats both split their primary votes then its possible for a major party to get shut out of the final election entirely? I'm stunned that the major parties would allow such a system.
I encourage everyone in Washington's 8th to vote Darcy Burner. She was a consistent opponent of both the lawless domestic surveillance program and amnesty for the telcoms. She's a supporter of Net neutrality and she knows how to code.
Possible but unlikely. Party players who have enough presence to command a significant part of the vote likely also have the acumen to not completely jack things up for their cohorts.
The voters are aware of this, too.
--D
Errata: it's definitely more possible than before, though.
--D