ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 9, 1996 TAG: 9606070011
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS EDITORIAL PAGE ASSOCIATE EDITOR
VIRGINIA sure doesn't make it easy to be a conscientious voter.
The calendar of incessant elections - some in the spring and others in the fall, some in even-numbered years and others in odd-numbered years - discourages all but the hardiest of civic souls from doing their get-out-the-vote duty each and every time.
Add to that the difficulties posed by the state's bizarre way of deciding party nominations.
More often than not, the choice is made via conventions in the control of party activists, as with the Democrats' selection this year of Mark Warner as their U.S. Senate candidate. But even when it is by primary, as is to be the case on Tuesday with the Republicans' Senate nomination, those of us in the muddled middle face a dilemma.
The apparatchiks who control the Virginia GOP, the shock troops of the Republican revolution, did not want to let the general public in on their deliberations any more than did the cadres of the Democratic Party.
Indeed, GOP activists are incensed that the choice of a U.S. Senate nominee this year is not theirs alone.
If it were, incumbent Republican John Warner already would have been unceremoniously dumped from the ticket. Instead, at the state GOP convention the other day in Salem, Warner was merely dumped on.
The delegates voted by an overwhelming margin their support of James Miller, the ideologically chaster challenger. But it's the primary, called by Warner under a peculiar provision of Virginia law, that will determine who'll be the Republican nominee.
If the few thousand GOP activists in Virginia have a problem with the situation, so do the hundreds of thousands of ticket-splitting Virginians who consider themselves neither solid Republicans nor down-the-line Democrats.
On the one hand, we are persistently admonished to faithfully discharge our obligations as citizens of a democracy, to troop to the polls any time they're open. Well, they'll be open on Tuesday - and with no registration by party in Virginia, all voters have a legal right to cast a ballot in the Republican primary.
On the other hand, we are told by most GOP leaders that a Republican primary should be for Republicans only, that participation by the unpartied is unwelcome. What genuine Virginian would be so uncouth as to insert his or her presence where it is not wanted?
But back to the first hand, a political party isn't a private club, and healthy two-party competition is a goal of interest to more than just the stalwartly partisan. Does a party sometimes need rescuing from its own loyalists?
Party regulars' traditional fear of open primaries is that members of the other party will sabotage the process - deliberately voting for the candidate least likely to win in the general election. But the move to oust the state GOP's most proven general-election vote-getter, endorsed by the party's presidential nominee-to-be, is coming from within the ranks of Republican insiders, not from disguised Democrats intent on damaging GOP chances in November.
But back to the other hand, should a citizen's obligation to do what he or she can to foster a healthy two-party system, or to support the preferable candidate among the available alternatives, trump his or her own political convictions?
Even if you're a Republican with a clear liking for one of Tuesday's candidates over the other, the choice might not be simple. By nature, primary elections involve an additional consideration: Which candidate has a better chance of winning in the general election? The primary candidate whose views most closely parallel your own may not be the candidate you think is best placed to deny victory in November to a Democrat whose views least jibe with your own.
When independents and Democrats are allowed to butt in (and independents and Republicans if it were a Democratic primary), as they are under Virginia's rules, matters get all the more complicated.
Should a Virginia Democrat join angry GOP activists in voting for Miller on the grounds that Miller's nomination by the Republicans would give the Democrats a better shot of winning in November? Or should Democrats vote for John Warner on the grounds that he comes at least marginally closer to their views than Miller? Or, for Democrats and independents, is voting at all in a Republican primary taking unfair advantage?
As life decisions go, whether a non-Republican should take part in a Republican primary isn't high on the list of things to worry about. Still, it would be nice if the law were changed to clear up some of the messy ambiguities. Make primaries mandatory, on the same day for both parties with nobody allowed to take part in both. Registration by party would be an improvement, too.
The decision for Virginians on Election Day should be for whom to vote, not whether to.
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines KEYWORDS: POLITICS CONGRESSby CNB