SB 630, the so-called “open primary” bill, threatens to demolish political parties as vehicles by which citizens can band together to advance their views and help complete the takeover of the political process by monied interests.

The “open” doesn’t refer to your ability to vote in the primary of your choice–au contraire, rather it refers to taking control of each party’s nominations away from politically active people who make up the parties and giving it over to — mainly — people who oppose what that party stands for.

Why have an election that would let all candidates run and then have a complete second election between the top two finishers just to pick the winner?

Why not just use the preference voting option already a part of the Oregon Constitution?

By using preference voting you could allow as many candidates as desired to run under the banner of their party affiliation and get the job done with one election, with no need to fool around (or pay for) a completely unnecessary primary round.

This bill is bad on so many levels — from letting non-party members determine who the party’s nominees are, to elimination of minor parties’ ability to field candidates, to wasting time on a method the US Supreme Court already struck down once … it just goes on and on. Shame that the numbering wasn’t more reflective of the contents … something like SB 666 would have been a better label for this turkey.

Call or write your rep. and say “No thanks, not buying it” and ask them to oppose SB 630.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Blogroll, Elections, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.