By Gary Walker

Beginning next year, voters in California could see two candidates from the same political party face off in the general election, thanks to the passage of Proposition 14.

Prop. 14, which was approved by the electorate on June 8 with 53.7 % of the vote, created an open primary system in which the top two winners, regardless of political party, will then meet in the general election. The new law will effectually eliminate party primaries.

This is not the first time that California has experimented with an open primary system. In the late 1990s, the state adopted primary rules similar to 12 other states and several others that have open caucuses.

“We had open primaries several years ago for two election cycles before the courts invalidated it,” Kim Alexander, a Culver City native who heads the California Voter Foundation, told the News last month. “During the time when it was in place, there was an increase in voter turnout.”

The Sacramento-based organization is a nonpartisan nonprofit created in 1994 to improve democracy through the responsible use of new technology and provide Californians with nonpartisan election and governmental information.

The law was overturned in 2000 by the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in the California Democratic Party vs. Jones that political parties had the right to choose their own candidates without the participation from non-members.

Prop. 14 was championed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, who said it could help break the gridlock at the state Capitol by giving voters more control over who appears on the ballot.

“This sends a clear message that Californians are tired of partisan gridlock and dysfunction and want a system where representatives put what’s best for California ahead of extreme partisan doctrine,” the governor said in a statement after the ballot measure passed.

Proponents of an open primary may still face legal hurdles. Both the state Republican and Democratic parties are both weighing legal challenges to Prop. 14.

Jessica Levinson of the Center for Governmental Studies believes that it is only a matter of time before the two major parties will seek to have the new law nullified. “I think it’s clear that (Prop. 14) will be challenged in court,” she predicted.

Levinson, the center’s political director of political reform, said one of the primary challenges to open primaries has centered on a denial of associational rights, which would be a violation of the First Amendment.

In Jones, the high court held that primaries allowing voters, regardless of their party affiliation, to cast ballots for candidates of any party violated the political parties’ right of free association under the First Amendment.

The Democratic and Republican parties in Washington state used that legal argument when they filed a lawsuit after its voters approved an open primary law in 2004. The plaintiffs argued that non-members of their parties would be allowed to choose its standard-bearers.

In the case of Grange & Washington vs. Washington state Republican Party, the Supreme Court sided against the major parties in March 2008, ruling in a 7-2 decision that to overturn the initiative would have been an “extraordinary and precipitous nullification of the will of the people.”

Vincent Motyl, who often quips that he is “one of the five Republicans in Culver City,” is intrigued with the ramifications of having all political parties run against each other directly in the primary election. “This will be a very interesting new concept,” he said.

Motyl believes that Prop. 14 could have a silver lining for middle-of-the-road Republicans seeking to appeal to a new group of voters without the encumbrance of hewing to a more partisan line, now that party primaries have essentially been eliminated. “By opening up the primaries, that could be better for a moderate Republican in the long run,” he said.

Steven Gourley, a former city councilman who is now the president of the Culver City Unified School District’s Board of Education, has a different viewpoint. “A runoff (between) the two highest vote-getters will not cause the candidates in the primary to be more moderate,” Gourley, a Democrat who voted for the ballot measure, asserted. “However, it will allow the real moderate a chance of winning in heavily Republican or Democratic districts in the general election.”

Motyl, who says he has voted for some Democrats on occasion, wonders how organized labor will react if two Democrats win the top two slots in the primary. “It would be interesting to see which unions support which candidates,” he said.

Gourley, who served on Culver City’s council for eight years and was also the state’s director of the Department of Motor Vehicles, has his own theory how such a matchup in the general election might turn out. He used the June Democratic primary of the 47th Assembly District, which encompasses Culver City, to illustrate.

“For example, in our last assembly race you really had a choice between a big labor candidate, Holly Mitchell, or a smaller labor candidate. If Mitchell were faced with meeting Reggie Jones-Sawyer in the general election and not a Republican, I think Jones would have attracted more votes in the general than she,” Gourley said. “Certainly after all the campaigning, he was in a better position to do that.”

Mitchell defeated Jones-Sawyer in the June primary.

Next week: How the “declined to state” voters can affect the outcome in an open primary and members of the Green and Libertarian parties weigh in on the possible effects of and potential legal challenges to Prop. 14.