Revisit primary election law
The Topeka Capital-Journal
Thursday, October 13, 2011
When Secretary of Administration Dennis Taylor has finished rooting out all the state laws that unduly hinder business growth and job development in his role as chief repealer, we’d suggest he and other officials take a look at the law that requires Kansas to conduct a presidential primary election every four years.
The law has been on the books since 1990, but Kansans haven’t voted in a presidential primary since 1992. The only other time the state’s voters participated in a presidential primary was 1980, when one was conducted as an experiment.
In other years, Kansas’ Democratic and Republican parties have relied on caucuses that they fund to determine how their delegates are allocated at the parties’ national conventions.
Since 1992, legislators have, in the odd numbered years before a presidential election, declined to fund the primary state statute says must be conducted the following year. No funding, no primary.
We don’t have a problem with the caucus system, nor are we opposed to a presidential primary. We think the voters can live with either, or perhaps even some combination of the two. But we are more than a little curious as to why legislators leave a law on the books that they so routinely and easily dismiss.
Gov. Sam Brownback has said presidential primaries involve more voters in the process and provide a better cross-section of the public’s views. He also has said funding a primary isn’t the easiest thing to do in tough economic times.
He’s right on both counts, but by the time next year’s presidential primaries are contested across the country it will have been 20 years since one was conducted in Kansas.
Certainly there were opportunities in that period to fund a primary.
In addition to the cost factor — Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach estimates it would cost the state $1.5 million to conduct a presidential primary in 2012 — there is the question of significance.
The relatively small number of delegates Kansas sends to the national conventions, coupled with the timing of a primary, really wouldn’t give the state much weight in determining the presidential nominees.
“You don’t want the $1.5 million to be spent on an election when it’s too late to affect the outcome,” said Kobach, a Republican.
“It isn’t as if Kansas is going to be deciding who’s going to be the presidential nominees,” said state Democratic Party Chairwoman Joan Wagnon. “We’re not, so why spend the money.”
That might be the only thing on which Kobach and Wagnon ever agree. But there is the participation factor.
Kansas’ 1980 presidential primary drew 479,000 voters to the polls. In 1992, 373,000 voters participated. In 2008, about 20,000 Kansas Republicans participated in their party’s caucus. The Democratic Party caucus was attended by about 37,000 of its members.
Clearly, voters like the primaries.
Obviously, legislators and other officials don’t think primaries are worth the expense.
We think it’s time legislators revisit the law and decide whether it should be repealed, amended — perhaps to give the voters a presidential primary once every eight years or once a decade — or left as it is.
After 20 years of avoiding the law, it’s a discussion worth having.