Spin Control: Nominations are set, but Washington presidential primary continues
Washington Republicans who already marked and mailed their presidential primary for Nikki Haley and Democrats who voted for Dean Phillips might be wondering what will happen to those votes after each dropped out of their respective races last week.
The bad news is, you can’t get your ballot back for a do-over. The good news is the vote will still be counted for that candidate, even though they dropped out of the race.
If you still have your presidential primary ballot – and state elections office reports say that as of Friday afternoon about 75% of you do – you can still vote for any of that party’s candidates on the ballot. Voters who check the Democratic ballot envelope can even vote for no one in particular by checking the “uncommitted” box.
But you can’t check the party box as a Democrat and vote for a Republican, or vice versa.
Because the race to pick the nominee is essentially over, the 2024 Washington presidential primary could go down as one of the least consequential in its checkered history. It should prompt a rethink of the current system – which has done little to elevate Washington’s place in the selection process – before 2028, when their will be no incumbent running and both parties might have a long list of potential candidates.
Most years, the discussion revolves around when to have it. Moving it up to Super Tuesday would only make sense if Oregon also held its primary then, allowing the two smaller states to piggyback on California as a bloc of voters worth the trip to the West Coast.
Otherwise, keeping it on the week after Super Tuesday makes as much sense as any date, under the theory that both parties are unlikely to go into 2028 with prohibitive favorites to clinch the nomination.
A bigger problem to address is creating a ballot that acknowledges the reluctance of many Washington voters to say they are a member of a party. They may not have voted for a Democrat since FDR or a Republican since Eisenhower, but many Washington voters will insist they are independent or offer some version of “I don’t vote for the party; I vote for the person.”
Statewide, more than 50,000 ballot envelopes had been returned by Friday without a party box being checked, which means they can’t be counted.
The fact that voters must pick a party only once every four years doesn’t help. Some object to the box being on the outside of the envelope, fearing that perfidious members of the other party might intercept their ballot and destroy it (Can’t happen, state elections officials say, because the drop boxes and the mail system are both secure.)
Others object to the fact that the parties can collect the names of those who checked the envelope box, even though the parties won’t know which candidate got the vote.
One voter emailed to say he didn’t want to check the box but didn’t want to ruin his perfect voting record by not voting in the presidential primary. While it’s true that an envelope without a signature or a checked party box won’t be opened for processing, as a party election it won’t affect a person’s voting record, which counts the general, state primary and any special local elections, Spokane Auditor Vicky Dalton said.
Still others, the most ardent independents, don’t want to lie and say they are members of a party when they aren’t, even if just for this election.
The parties’ rejoinder to that last objection – that picking a nominee is the job of party members, so true independents have no business voting – may be legally defensible but politically questionable. Every voter is getting a ballot, and their taxes are paying to mail them out, return and count them. Closing out their participation is a tough sell.
At the very least, the state should return to an unaffiliated option on the ballot that lists all the candidates from both parties, and provide those results, too.
That option could even provide an outlet for party members who aren’t happy with the likely nominee and want to vote for someone still in the race on the other side. It could also give an indication which candidates are running stronger among independents.
Such a system could at least cut down on the tens of thousands of ballots that have come in thus far with no box – or in some cases both boxes – checked. Some also have some not-so-polite messages about being asked to pick a party.
Elections officials must also take pains to assure voters that checking the box for the presidential primary does not mean that voter is then required to vote only for that party’s candidates in the August primary, or in the November general election.
Let’s face it: Washington’s tradition of not registering by party and being able to vote for any candidate in any race in the state primary dates back to the 1930s. It’s what the state’s voters experience at least every other year for federal, state and county elections. By comparison, the state’s presidential primary has happened at most once every four years since 1992, been canceled twice to save money and has been changed a little or a lot when it has been held.
It’s not sacrosanct like the New Hampshire primary or the Iowa caucuses. It could stand some improvements.
Red v. blue
While the winners of the Washington presidential primary are only a guess until Tuesday (wink, wink) we do have an ongoing count of the number of Democratic and Republican ballots returned .
As of Friday, about 21% of the state’s voters had turned in ballots, or a shade over 1 million. Spokane County turnout is a bit higher, at 25%. There’s a big gap between older and younger voters as far as turnout, with about 35% of voters 65 and older already in compared to less than 10% of voters between 18 and 44.
Democratic ballots were about 20,000 ahead of Republican ballots statewide, although Republican ballots lead Democrats in Spokane County in every age grouping. The Washington Secretary of State office has this and much more presidential primary data online, which you can see by going to sos.wa.gov/elections and clicking on the ballot return statistics box.