Good news! This is the last rotten Arizona primary election you'll ever vote in

We stink at primary elections in Arizona.

On days like today our partisan conceit is on display for everyone to see, and to remember, and then to blow up completely in November, when we rewrite the rules.

You could pick just about any primary race to illustrate the need to pass the Make Elections Fair Act in the general election.

That’s the citizens’ initiative signed by 550,000 or so of us that will flush partisan primaries down the toilet in favor of a primary ballot featuring all candidates.

Then, as described by former Attorney General Terry Goddard, one of those behind the initiative, the primary ballot will have “Democrats or Republicans, Greens or Blues, and you get to choose the top two, or the top three or four, and they will be in the finals in the general election.”

Initiative could make room for actual moderates

Pick any primary election today and you’ll see why that’s a good idea.

In Congressional District 1, for example, Democrats will be choosing from among six candidates with wildly varying degrees of experience and perspective, including a former Republican, a physician, a business owner, a former nonprofit executive, an orthodontist and a former party official.

Only one of them will get on the general election ballot, however.

Republicans, meanwhile, have a choice of one — incumbent U.S. Rep. David Schweikert. He gets to be on the general election ballot without a challenge.

How voters can Make Elections Fair:And the Legislature kook-free

An open primary might have drawn more Republicans and afforded no guarantees for Schweikert or anyone else.

When the system changes, it will be a chance for moderates to actually get on the general election ballot.

Independent voters will finally have their say

The way things work now, voters in the general election don’t get to choose from among the best or most interesting candidates, but almost always between the lesser of two evils.

As Goddard explained, “Because there’s a very small, usually very partisan people who vote in primaries, they tend to choose the most extreme choices … . So we end up with a Legislature that R’s and D’s don’t talk to each other because, on both sides, it’s considered treasonous to talk to each other, or for heaven’s sake, ever compromise.”

Meantime, independent voters, who make up a third of all voters in Arizona, get the second-class citizen treatment, forced to choose between the Republican or Democratic ballot in the primaries and ultimately, like the rest of us, left with the extremes in the general election.

People from every party and from none of the parties will get to vote in November on the Make Elections Fair Act, however.

And we will.

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

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