State governments should pay the price for democracy

Ben Fischer
columnist

These elections we all hear so much about these days aren’t cheap.

At least once a year, Ohio and the other 49 states spend millions to print up ballots, count votes and enforce campaign laws. And since 2000, states have been spending even more to upgrade voting systems.

But in these hard times, cash-strapped state governments are cutting back everywhere. And a few states are using a novel way to do it: canceling elections.

That’s right. In what is one of the most under-reported political developments of the year, three states — Colorado, Kansas and Utah — canceled next year’s primary elections to save money.

Tennessee and Arizona both toyed with the idea but ended up not doing it. Missouri’s state legislature voted to withhold funding from an election. But the lawmakers there never explicitly voted to stop the primary, so Secretary of State Matt Blunt decreed there would be an election anyway.

Keep in mind these are primary elections, which are by no means required by the U.S. or state constitutions. So they’re not exactly doing anything illegal.

But of the thousands of line items in a state budget where you can cut costs, does an election — the very demonstration of democracy — have to be one of them?

The primary election process, while certainly fraught with imperfections and frustrations, is nonetheless one of the greatest developments in American politics. We’ve gone from a few hundred members of each party picking a nominee to hundreds of thousands doing it.

As Time magazine wrote earlier this fall, the selection process for presidential nominees in pre-primary days made a mockery of democracy. It also made a mockery of a meritocracy by creating a culture in which the best man rarely won.

Before primaries, important party leaders gathered together, quite literally in “smoke-filled rooms” and fought it out for whom they would support. Sometimes there would be a consensus, but much of the time there wasn’t.

That lack of consensus would lead to compromising, like in “pre-primaries” 1920, when Ohio’s junior senator, a little-known guy named Warren Harding, earned the nomination just because no one objected. As history shows us, he was little-known for a reason.

Let’s fast-forward to 2000 when 46 states held statewide primaries. Despite George W. Bush’s status as the official choice of the Republican Party leaders, the rank-and-file voters in primaries made him work for it.

They made John McCain the winner in New Hampshire, and two months of solid political drama ensued; of course, Bush ultimately won, but he first had to prove to his party he wasn’t a complete waste. And the country was better because of the fight.

In Utah, killing the 2004 primary made for a one-time savings of $2.2 million — out of a projected $800 million budget shortfall. That’s less than one-third of 1 percent of the total deficit. So why rush to kill the primary?

Some say party politics. Utah, Kansas, Colorado, Missouri and Arizona all have Republican-controlled legislatures. With President Bush a shoo-in for renomination, the Republican primary will be a formality; canceling the election will deprive the nine Democratic candidates from much-needed media exposure in those states.

Arizona Gov. Jane Napolitano, a Democrat, said it best when she vetoed her state legislature’s bill to cancel the 2004 primary: “Arizona can well afford the price of democracy.”

Every state can. And every state should.

Ben Fischer is a senior newspaper journalism major and is participating in the Columbus Program in Intergovernmental Issues this semester. He is a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater.

E-mail: bafische@kent.edu {\rtf1\mac\ansicpg10000\cocoartf102 {\fonttbl} {\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;} \margl1440\margr1440\vieww9000\viewh7500\viewkind0 }