Two Pennsylvania state senators introduced a bill on Wednesday to open participation in the commonwealth’s primaries to nonpartisan voters.
At the Capitol Media Center in Harrisburg, prime sponsors State Senators Dan Laughlin (R-Erie) and Lisa Boscola (D-Bethlehem), said their bill would empower voters heretofore excluded from nomination decisions and would counteract hyper-partisanship. Both lawmakers are among the most moderate members of their chamber.
“Open primaries will produce better candidates capable of speaking to broader positions of the electorate in the fall,” Laughlin (pictured above, right) said. “And given that all taxpayers pay for primary elections, and how decisions and votes by any of these elected leaders could affect every Pennsylvanians, it’s hard to imagine a more stark example of ‘taxation without representation,’ especially in local races.”
Currently, only Republicans and Democrats may vote in their parties’ respective nominating elections in the Keystone State. Eight other states — Delaware, New York, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, and New Mexico — disallow nonpartisans to vote in major-party nomination contests.
According to the sponsors, 1.1 million Pennsylvania voters affiliate with neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party. Laughlin, Boscola (pictured above, left) and other bill supporters lamented that this number includes many Pennsylvania veterans, half of whom are independents and many younger voters, 40 percent of whom identify as nonpartisan. Former Pittsburgh Steeler Rocky Bleier, a Bronze Star and Purple Heart awardee for Army service in Vietnam, was video-conferenced into the announcement to discuss his support for the legislation.
“[A] veteran [voter] has fought for the Constitution… and it is not fighting for a party but it’s fighting for a country,” Bleier said. “It’s not red and it’s not blue but it’s red, white and blue very simply. And so that right to vote in the primary should be open to all who participate.”
Ballot PA Chair David Thornburgh, as well as State Senators Pat Stefano (R-Somerset) and Maria Collett (D-North Wales), also offered remarks in favor of the open-primary bill, which awaits consideration by the Senate State Government Committee. Similar legislation overwhelmingly passed the chamber in 2019. The measure was reintroduced last session but did not receive a vote.
While most legislators seem supportive of open primaries, many political experts and activists doubt they would have the salutary effects Laughlin and Boscola anticipate. Ryan Shafik, principal of the campaign-consulting firm Rockwood Strategies, said that while he is not flatly opposed to opening nomination votes to independents, he does not see officials who propound the idea has having a pure motive.
“The establishment thinks by opening primaries up to independents, it will stop them from losing elections…,” the conservative strategist told The Pennsylvania Daily Star. “For them, it’s an incumbent protection plan. It’s not about good government or caring about independents’ voices; it’s more that they don’t want to have to deal with somebody defeating them in the primary.”
Shafik cited the examples of former State Representatives Stan Saylor (R-Windsor), Keith Gillespie (R-Hallam) and Rick Geist (R-Altoona), as well as State Senators Randy Vulakovich (R-Pittsburgh) and Pat Browne (R-Allentown). He described all these lawmakers as “RINOs,” or “Republicans in name only.” All of them lost to more conservative primary challengers in recent years and all but one of the challengers — Vulakovich’s opponent Jeremy Shaffer — went on to win in the general election.
Lowman Henry, a Republican state committeeman who chairs the Harrisburg-based Lincoln Institute of Public Opinion Research, said he is firmly against an open-primary system, calling it “a ploy by moderates to marginalize conservatives with the GOP.”
And not everyone agrees politics will suddenly become more civil or less polarized if nonpartisans gain the ability to vote in primaries.
“There’s very little evidence to support this,” University of Denver political science Professor Seth Masket told The Daily Star. “In research I’ve done with other scholars, states with more open primaries do not produce more moderate elected officials.”
Opponents of proposals like Laughlin’s also dispute that Pennsylvania’s system somehow denies voting rights to eligible voters since independents can gain the right to vote in a major-party primary by registering as a party member.
“Nobody’s disenfranchising independent or unaffiliated voters; they’re disenfranchising themselves,” Lehigh Valley-based attorney Frank DeVito said. “I think that the disenfranchising-a-voter argument only makes sense when that person is being prevented from voting based on their membership in a class or something they can’t do anything about.”
Masket concurred. He said party-exclusive primaries are simply a means by which those who affiliate with a partisan organization pick that organization’s nominee. He observed that every registered independent who would acquire the right to vote in an open primary can already vote in general elections and therefore can’t be considered truly “disenfranchised.”
“It’s like saying that I’m disenfranchised from voting in the Academy Awards,” he explained. “This is insulting to those who have truly been disenfranchised from voting in general elections throughout history…. Parties have a lot of leeway to determine just who does and doesn’t get to participate in making their own internal decisions, and I don’t have a ‘right’ to participate in the decision-making of an organization to which I don’t belong.”
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Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Pennsylvania Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Background Photo “Voting Booths” by Tim Evanson. CC BY-SA 2.0.
