No political parties, please. It's an election.

Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.
~Robert Byrne

I just mailed in my ballot for Washington's August 19 primary election. For the first time, Washington's primary is not a means of selecting the Democratic and Republic nominees, who will square off against each other in the general election. Instead, the primary will narrow the field of all candidates to the two receiving the most votes. Those two will run against each other in the general election, even if they both happen to be from the same political party.

The only concession by the state to party politics is to permit each candidate to designate on the ballot the party that he "prefers." This designation simply provides a piece of information to the voters, assisting them in making their selection. Instead of party name, the rules could just as easily have permitted each candidate to describe himself as "liberal," "moderate," or "conservative."

As far as the State of Washington is concerned, parties no longer play any role in the election process.

How did we reach this point? For years, we had a "blanket primary," where all candidates for each office were listed on the ballot, together with their political party. The Democrat and the Republican receiving the most votes ran against each other in the general election. ("Minor parties" selected their nominees by political conventions.) This method permitted Democrats, for example, to vote for a Democrat for governor, a Republican for lieutenant governor, and so on, down the ballot. Unlike in most states, voters did not register for a political party and vote only in that party's primary. Nor, unlike voters in some states that do not require registration by political party, did they select at the time of the primary either a Republican or a Democratic ballot to cast.

To me, being irrationally rational, the blanket primary never made any sense. A party should be able to select its own nominees by the vote of its own members. If the state is going to mandate use of a primary election, the voters in the primary should at least be forced to restrict themselves to one party, at least for the duration of that one election.

Besides the blanket primary's being illogical, it allowed strong partisans to vote in the opposing party's primary for the sole purpose of selecting the weakest candidate. For example, if the Republican governor had no serious opposition in the primary, devout Republicans could vote for the Democrat who would present the least serious threat to the Republican in November.

Nevertheless, the blanket primary was popular with Washington voters, who've never much cared for political parties, anyhow.

The blanket primary was finally thrown out by the federal courts in 2003, as violating the rights of the political parties to free association. (The U.S. Supreme Court had held a somewhat similar California system void for that reason in 1986.) Voters then approved the present "top-two" system -- which essentially makes all offices non-partisan -- by passing Initiative 872 by a sixty percent margin in 2004. Both political parties challenged the validity of Initiative 872 in federal court. A local federal judge held that the initiative, like the blanket primary, was invalid, and entered an injunction against its implementation. The Court of Appeals in San Francisco affirmed, and the parties asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the matter.

While this injunction remained in effect, from 2004 until this year, Washington used a two ballot system, giving each primary voter both a blue Democratic ballot and a red Republican ballot. The voter could cast one, but only one, of the two ballots. This system maintained the secrecy of each voter's political affiliation. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Washington voters hated it.

The matter reached the U. S. Supreme Court this year. The Court upheld the system by a 7-2 vote in March. In Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party, 552 U.S. __, 128 S. Ct. 1184, 170 L. Ed. 2d 151 (2008), the Supreme Court reversed the contrary decisions by the federal district court and by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The dissent and some of the majority did express concern that allowing candidates to state their party preference on the ballot would suggest to voters that the candidate had been endorsed by the party he preferred, thus, again, violating rights of association of the political parties. But the majority was willing to wait and see how the state actually handled the election. In fact, the state has leaned over backward to indicate that party affiliation as indicated on the ballot shows only the party preference of the candidate, not an endorsement by the party. The voters' pamphlet and the materials that come with the ballots in the mail also emphasize this distinction.

This post has become long and unwieldy, and probably too legalistic, but the history of this month's election reveals the following competing interests: (1) of candidates to be identified by party preference; (2) of the political parties to control the selection of their own candidates; and (3) of the voters to vote for anyone they damn well please, to avoid revealing to anyone their political affiliation, and to be unrestricted in voting for candidates from any political party -- even in the primary. These interests prove to be totally incompatible and logically inconsistent in the context of a political primary election.

The solution chosen by Washington voters, and now declared permissible by the U.S. Supreme Court, is -- in effect -- to protect the political parties' constitutional right of association by removing them entirely from the election process, aside from revealing the candidates' party "preferences." A rather Pyrrhic victory in the end, for the political parties, don't you think?

So, I've cast my ballot. I admit, I have my doubts about this whole scheme. But I'm willing to wait and see how it works out in practice before, like Zeus from a storm cloud, I hurl any general denouncements down to Earth.