A young lady asks for help with a voting machine in the first year 18-year olds could vote, 1971
Frank Cagle asks the interesting question about who should pay for primary elections since they are, in fact, party nominating contests:
If one-third of the voters are neither Republicans nor Democrats, then why does the state of Tennessee pay for party primaries to pick party nominees?
The state political parties do not have any established criteria for what constitutes a bona fide Republican or Democratic candidate. There is no due process.
It was impossible for [Rosalind] Kurita to be restored to the ballot and it appears impossible for Williams to get on the Republican primary ballot—because there are no procedures in place that require the political parties to explain why some people are not “real” party nominees and others are.
It will anger some who are regular readers to this column, but Frank Cagle not only has raised a fair point, it is one which has concerned me for some time. Earlier this week, I wrote in this space that I believe that Tennessee's political parties should move toward a closed primary system, pointing out that our parties already take the liberty of determining who is a valid Republican or Democrat and what constitutes a valid primary, as in the case of both Kent Williams and Rosalind Kurita. In order to be able to adequately define what and/or who constitutes a Republican or a Democrat, the parties need to be able to close the primaries and have voters register as members of one party or the other.
State law already allows for a political party to choose its nominees for office in a way other than by primary, because how a party chooses to nominate candidates is ultimately up to that party and its governing body. Yet by custom and tradition, primaries are the preferred method to nominate candidates. Because the process is a party political one, parties may throw out a perfectly good result at will, or accept a questionable one as they see fit (not that doing either is the right thing to do).
Closing the primary in Tennessee seems the logical way to insure that candidates pass either party's rules of muster-and in a closed primary system, the major parties must enact such standards of legitimacy and keep them. Without a closed primary and set standards, our parties engage in a "pick and choose" standard with no criteria but anger for the enforcement of that standard. However, if the political parties are going to exercise the franchise in the form of a primary to nominate, parties ought to foot the bill. Many States already ask their political party organizations to pay for part or all of their primary process, and doing so in Tennessee would mean that not only would it be even easier to justify a closed primary, but the parties could make and enforce the rules of the vote with little question because it would be their nominating process and their show to run.
Tennessee's major political parties haven't had to budget for primaries yet because they haven't been made to pay for them, but our own political history indicates two things about our primaries-they are historically low-turnout elections, and they are often more important than the general elections which follow them. It may be that parties might have to raise just a bit more money in order to pay for their own nominating process, but that is a small price to pay to insure that party nominees are actually chosen by party members.
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