Excluding parties isn’t more choice

It is difficult to understand how this paper can state that voters have “real choices” in a top-two primary, which, as you note, is not a primary election at all but a winnowing election. (Thursday editorial, “Voters vindicated by new primary’s success.”)

Under the top-two primary, it will be a rare election indeed in which a minority party candidate ever makes it to the general election ballot since only two candidates can advance, not one from each party. What is fair, or a “real choice,” about denying the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, the Reform Party, or any other party a place on the general election ballot?

You note that a number of districts heavily weighted to one party or the other will have two candidates from the same party. You state that “… the result is that a real debate can take place.” Between what? Vanilla and vanilla? Even in a heavily Republican District, some 30-40 percent of the voters tend Democratic, and vice versa. How can you endorse a process which forces Republicans to have to choose between two Democrats (or vice versa)?

The summer primary election, with current participation statewide at just over 30 percent, ensures that a minority party won’t have the extra time to November to try and persuade voters to change their minds, since it will be knocked off in August. Moreover, the Top Two primary invites mischief by packing the ballot by candidates from a heavily majority party — to a degree that other points of view just won’t bother to run at all. Does that increase choices for voters?

The top two is a device which protects incumbents, not ideas, and which only solidifies the sorry polarization of legislative districts and regions of our state by reducing the chance that other points of view will get a real hearing into the general election.

Todd C. Nichols

Snohomish