Targeting the Party Switchers. The 2019 Legislative Session Kicks Off.

The 2019 Legislative Session has kicked in, in the form of pre filed bills and committee meetings and, one of those early filed bills looks to. . .. the 2018 election.

As anyone following the late stages of the 2018 Gubernatorial Race would be aware of, late in the 2018 session the failed gubernatorial candidates, or at least some of them, and in particular one of them, began to complain that Democrats had crossed over and doomed their candidacy. 

There is, quite frankly, a certain element of hubris in an assumption like that, to say the least.

Such candidates were the extremely conservative ones, at least one of whom had a thin connection to the state in general in some ways, and there seemed to be s certain lack of knowledge on the state’s political culture on their part.  The state has never actually been liberal in the Alabama or Texas sense (not that those two things are the same), but more in a high plains sense.

As the Democratic Party is dead here there’s real reason to believe that Democrats crossing to the GOP would have little impact on any one race, but those failed candidates believe it and now a new Republican legislator from Ranchester (an area of the state which has had some odd politics in recent years) in the Senate had introduced a bill which would require a notarized signature in advance of an election to switch as well as submission of the switch form to an election judge.

In other words, switching would be more difficult.

That’s about all that would do.  Assuming election judges do their jobs honestly, they’d look at it and say “yup. . . that’s a form alright”.  Of course, history in other localities has shown that submitting such things to election judges often serves as a source of mischief for a party under stress, which mysteriously finds that Mrs. Ima Republican didn’t properly sign, or something, and is really a Democrat.

Indeed, the requirement of a notarized signature does nothing other than to serve that interest as at best a notary has verified that you are who you say your are by the presentation of identification, if not known to the notary personally.  Generally the Clerk’s office has notaries so that’s about all that would actually do, other than to further emphasize that you need to do it in advance of the election.

All this really points to a single thing, which is that primaries are party elections and if you don’t like people voting in them, don’t have one.  Disgruntled GOP figures should keep that in mind. If they did that, they could pick the candidates they wanted through a convention process, as they did in the old smoke filled room days. 

On the other hand, if they want to make switching parties more difficult, and they figure that a lot of Democrats switched in the 2018 Primary Season they ought to also consider that those Democrats probably wouldn’t be switching back until 2020. . . and so by making it more difficult, they’ll probably help cement some of them in the GOP.