Voters registered as Independent, Democrat and Republican

Sometimes it is hard to tell one political party from the other when you really look at how certain candidates vote and compare that to the party platforms that are supposed to be guiding their voting decisions.  How much does a party label really tell you about a candidate?  Not much.

But does having a certain party label on a ballot effect the way people vote?  You betcha.  And that is why former Nirvana bassist and Chairman of the Wahkiakum Democratic Party Krist Novoselic is running for county clerk as a member of the “Grange Party”.  There is no such political party.  Novoselic is making the point that the current system allows anyone to run in the primary with any party label they want.  He is going to resign if he actually wins the clerk position.  He is just trying to prove a point.  Krist says:

“Any interloper or any lazy bum could say, ‘Yeah, I’m a Republican,’ because it suits them politically,” he said. “Why should any party bother to nominate anybody when Oscar the Grouch could jump out of the garbage can and say, ‘I’m a Democrat, too,’ or ‘I’m Grange Party’ or ‘I’m a Republican’?”

This was a problem when someone declares their candidacy even before the “top two” system became law.  The issue boils down to whether a political party should be able to determine or at least influence which candidates run using their particular party affiliation.  Since so many of us blindly vote party over person, any influence a party has over who runs in the primary puts them in a powerful position to determine who eventually gets elected.

The last election cycle left a bad taste in my mouth because the State Democratic Party basically ordered the local districts to endorse one and only one candidate for each open seat in the primary.  They did this, I believe, to deter more than one democratic candidate from running on the ballot.  And this worked, at least in the district in which I reside.   Why did the party do this?  If two strong Republicans run against two weak Democrats, it is very possible that the two Republicans will be the top two vote getters and win, thereby shutting out the Democrats in the general election.

I am unconvinced as to whether this is a better system than the previous system where you were forced to vote entirely for one party or the other in the primary and therefore there was always one Democrat and one Republican in the general election.  It seems that on the one hand the “top two” diminishes the importance and power of the political parties which, in my opinion, is a good thing.  But on the other hand, it does seem that it can produce an election outcome that has possibly been manipulated rather than democratically determined which, in my opinion, is a bad thing.

Ultimately it should be the person who earns the most votes wins with campaign spending on a level playing field through voter-owned elections.  The parties should get the hell out of the way.

Perhaps instant run-off voting will someday take hold and make this whole issue moot.

Or will it?