YO YO COLLECTORS
Opinion: Arizona’s leaders are proof that we need nonpartisan elections. But ironically, we’re moving away from the reforms that could make that happen.
By Robert Robb | Arizona Republic
The Arizona Republican Party has election validity problems of its own. The results of the election of state officers at the January state meeting have been disputed.
Skeptics circulated a petition calling for a redo. Party officials, chosen by virtue of the election being disputed, said that an insufficient number of signatures had been collected.
Skeptics went to court, asking a judge to decide otherwise and order that another election meeting be held.
Last week, the judge, Michael Kemp, declined to do so. Basically, he found that the Arizona Republican Party was a private organization with its own rules and its own enforcement procedures. It wasn’t the job of the judicial branch to intervene in an intraparty squabble, particularly given the First Amendment implications involved with political parties.
For the most part, I think the judge was right. This wasn’t something for the judicial branch to sort out.
However, the nature of political parties in our system of government isn’t as simple as the judge made it out to be.
It’s time to divorce parties from the state.
