By Abdul Hakim-Shabazz
IndyPoltics.Org

With the May primary being about a month away, a few things popped on my radar screen to make me think that it’s probably time for Indiana to change the way it conducts primaries. No I take that back, it’s time to eliminate taxpayer-funded primaries.

Abdul Hakim-Shabazz is an attorney and the editor and publisher of IndyPoltics.Org.

I reached this conclusion after doing a story about the actual number of contested primaries in Indiana. It was interesting to see how many races there were in both the Democratic and Republican primaries with only one person on the ballot. For example, only 15 percent of the 100 races in the Indiana House of Representatives were contested. However, looking at the data and filings got me wondering about the bigger question: What is the point of a primary?  It’s for political parties to pick a candidate to present to the voters to win in a general election.

So, if the point of a primary is for Democrats and Republicans to pick their candidates, why should the general public pick up the tab? I can see if we were doing an open primary and the top two vote getters faced off in the general election, but we don’t. Indiana’s primaries are closed, which means only “declared” Republicans and Democrats are supposed to vote in them. And, no offense to my political friends, but having to spend the taxpayers’ resources so a handful of politicos can nominate a candidate is kind of silly. As any county clerk will tell you, running an election is complicated. You need election judges, inspectors, poll workers for each precinct. You have to find space. Ballots have to be printed. You need to procure machines to count the ballots. That seems like a lot of work so 11-12 percent of registered voters can choose a candidate.

Primaries are a function of political parties and they should be the ones footing the bill. So instead of a political primary, why not do county conventions? They would operate just like state and national conventions where the parties and their delegates would select a candidate to present to the voters. We already do this Indiana with the secretary of state’s office, treasurer, auditor and attorney general.  The Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians have conventions in which they nominate candidates and then present them to voters for approval in November.

Now one of the criticisms of eliminating the primary system is that the party bosses and insiders will pick the candidate and the better choice may not necessarily be the one who is picked by the voters. That is a risk that you take, but I point to the most recent example of “party bosses” getting their hats and other parts of their anatomy handed to them at the most recent Marion County Democratic slating in February. The party “leadership” wanted to back the coroner, Dr. Frank Lloyd, as the candidate for clerk as opposed to Myla Eldridge, who actually worked in the Clerk’s office for the past seven years and has helped run elections. And, despite threats, intimidation and usual Democratic election chicanery, the precinct committeemen said they had enough and chose the much more qualified candidate in Eldridge.

The trick in all this is figuring out a system to choose delegates or precinct committee folks, but I am sure that can be figured out. There are a lot of smart people in this state in all political parties that can come up with an answer. But the current system needs to be changed. As long as primaries remained closed and voters have few choices, then there’s no reason taxpayers should open their wallets and foot the bill to do for political parties what they should be doing for themselves.

Abdul is an attorney and the editor and publisher of IndyPoltics.Org. He is also a frequent contributor to numerous Indiana media outlets. He can be reached at abdul@indypolitics.org.