Of all the sneaky things on the ballot in Arizona this year, perhaps nothing is sneakier than the campaign to protect partisan primaries.
The political powers-that-be are horrified at the prospect of Proposition 140, the Make Elections Fair Arizona Act, becoming law.
Proposition 140, after all, would scrap partisan primaries, replacing them with a single open primary in which every voter has an equal voice and every candidate an equal shot.
It’s a proposal that could usher in a new era in Arizona politics, one in which the state’s leaders actually represent a majority of the state’s voters.
Terrifying, I know.
For well over a year, Republican power brokers have been in a near panic about the prospect of modernizing our primary elections to reflect the fact that more than a third of Arizona’s 4.1 million voters have deserted the two political parties.
They sued, hoping to knock Make Elections Fair off the Nov. 5 ballot.
They adopted a misleading analysis for the publicity pamphlet, hoping to fool voters into thinking that this mandates ranked choice voting. (It doesn’t.)
They even........