by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.
Every time a Republican loses a primary to a few crossover votes — see the ongoing Copenhaver-Deery slow-motion food fight up in Senate District 23 — the same idea comes roaring back like a bad Police Academy movie sequel. Close the primaries. Make people register by party. Keep the Democrats out of “our” elections.
It’s a great applause line. Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith likes it. Max Engling used it at last week’s Hancock County GOP event and got a big round of applause. The base loves it. And every couple of sessions somebody files a bill — HB 1029, SB 201, take your pick — that dies a quiet death because at some point an adult with a green eyeshade walks into the room and asks the only question that ever matters: who’s paying for it?
Here’s the part the applause line skips. Indiana doesn’t register voters by party. Never has. There is no box on the form. There is no list. The state has no official idea whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat, a Libertarian, or a guy who turns up every few years to vote against whoever annoyed him most recently. We have an open primary and a quaint, largely unenforced affiliation statute — ask Paula Copenhaver how leaning on that is working out — and that’s the whole apparatus.
So when somebody says “just close the primaries,” what they’re actually proposing is building a partisan voter-registration system from scratch for roughly 4.7 million Hoosiers. And that, friends, is not free.
So how would it even work? For new voters, easy. Add a line to the registration form — pick a team — and from that day forward, anybody signing up tells the state where they stand. Problem solved, for the handful of people registering tomorrow morning.
But the rest of us? All 4.7 million already on the rolls? We registered under a system that never asked. There’s no party on file because there was never a place to put one. So what happens to you, and to me, and to the neighbor who’s voted in every election since Reagan?
There are roughly three ways to deal with the people who are already registered, and every one of them is a mess.
You can guess. Auto-assign everybody based on the last primary ballot they pulled — tidy, until you remember that a big chunk of Hoosiers don’t reliably pull a partisan primary ballot at all, plenty have pulled different ones in different years, and some haven’t voted in a primary in their lives. Guess wrong and you’ve just informed a lifelong Republican that he’s a Democrat, or locked an independent out completely. Enjoy those phone calls.
You can ask — which is the mailing, the one that has to reach 4.7 million people, more than once, behind a hard deadline, and trust that they actually open it. (More on that bill in a second.)
Or you can default everyone to “unaffiliated” and make them opt in. Which means that on primary day, millions of Hoosiers who’ve voted their entire adult lives step up, ask for a ballot, and get told they should have filled out a form 119 days ago. Nothing radicalizes a 70-year-old precinct regular faster than getting turned away from the table she’s voted at since 1984.
Start with the mail. To do this even halfway competently, the state has to reach every registered voter, give them a chance to declare a party — or auto-sort them and then explain how to fix it. A single first-class mailing to 4.7 million households clears seven figures in postage before you’ve printed a word, stuffed an envelope, or paid one clerk to process one reply. And you don’t get to do it once. You do it again for the folks who didn’t respond, again for the ones who moved, and again every time somebody wants to switch teams.
Then there’s the back end. The statewide voter registration system has to be reprogrammed to capture, store, and verify an affiliation it was never built to hold. Ninety-two county clerks’ offices have to be trained and staffed for the deluge. Somebody has to run a public-education campaign so that millions of people understand the rules they’ve followed their entire adult lives just changed — because nothing says “election integrity” like a few hundred thousand confused voters showing up in May to learn they’re locked out of the only race on the ballot.
Don’t take my word for the tab. Louisiana went down this road, and its own legislative fiscal office pegged the cost of standing up a closed primary at roughly $3.3 million for a single cycle — about $3 million of it just for voter outreach and printing. Louisiana has fewer registered voters than we do. Do the arithmetic.
And what are we buying, exactly? A system engineered to stop the truly terrifying threat of … people voting. In a state where most general elections were decided the day the maps were drawn, the primary is frequently the only contest that means anything. Telling those voters to pick a team months in advance or sit down doesn’t protect the process. It just shrinks it — and charges you for the privilege.
And let’s drop the pretense that any of this is a neutral principle. Crossover voting isn’t new, and until about five minutes ago nobody clutched their pearls over it. Democrats in Hamilton County have pulled Republican ballots for years — because in Carmel and Fishers and Noblesville, the GOP primary is the election and November is a formality. Republicans in Lake County have done the same in reverse, taking Democratic ballots because nobody’s carrying Gary or Hammond with an R after their name. That’s not fraud. That’s voters in a one-party county trying to have some say in who actually governs them — and for decades, nobody filed a recount petition about it. The statute only got interesting the day a candidate came up three votes short.
If you want to close the primaries, fine. Bring a number. Bring a funding source. Bring the fiscal note and read it out loud at the next rally. Until then, this isn’t an election-integrity proposal. It’s an expensive way to lose by three votes and blame the other team.
Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of Indy Politics. He is also an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois.
