Letters to the editor, 8/9/2025

Closed primaries still affect all voters

I appreciate where Kyle Sammin is coming from in his recent editorial about opening up primary elections in Pennsylvania (8/1/25). We need to make sure that our elections are working as well as possible to serve the interests of the voters. However, I believe that there are some significant flaws with Mr. Sammin’s arguments against open primaries.

An argument often made in favor of closed partisan primaries, including in that editorial, is that letting non-members vote in a political party is equivalent to letting non-members vote in a union, homeowner’s association, or other private group. The problem with this argument is that everyone, members and non-members alike, has a stake in the outcome. If you or I don’t live in HOA neighborhoods then we are not affected by any HOA’s decisions, but when political parties are choosing their nominees for public office we suffer the same consequences as everyone else (especially if we live in districts that are considered “safe” for one party, where the outcome of that party’s primary pretty much determines the result of the general election).

So why not just join a party, as Sammin suggests in his editorial? I’m not going to speak for all of Pennsylvania’s 1.4 million registered independent voters (as reported in the Department of State’s 2024 statistics), but I can safely say that most, if not all, of us have our reasons for staying independent – it’s not like we just forgot that party registration was an option until the closed-primary advocates helpfully reminded us. That said, I myself did hold my nose and register with one of the major parties a few years ago, for the specific purpose of trying to do damage control in their primaries (not that it helped). Personal morals aside, it was indeed a quick and painless process, just two minutes on the DoS website to update my voter registration and that was it. When I gave up on my “damage control” idea and changed my registration back to independent, it was just as easy. And that shows exactly why closed primaries are pointless anyway. Why bother making partisan primaries “members only” if any registered voter can become a member just for today, cast their vote, and then quit being a member tomorrow? Let’s just drop the charade.

Sammin’s arguments against open primaries led him to an interesting conclusion – getting rid of primary elections altogether. I actually agree with him on this. Like him, I don’t think that taxpayer money should be funding political parties’ internal decision making. But I disagree with his suggestion to go back to, as he put it, the “smoke-filled room” model. I think the right way to stop wasting time and money on primaries is to instead just allow all eligible candidates to run in the general election, and decide the result with a voting method that is not susceptible to “splitting,” such as Approval Voting or STAR Voting. This would do a much better job of ensuring that all voters get an equal chance to have their voices heard, without having to jump through the hoops of joining a private club first.

Josh Feldblyum is an independent voter and armchair good-government advocate living in Delaware County.