Open primaries proponents optimistic despite criticism

SQ 835 would amend state constitution to create open primary election system.

November 21, 2024

As a Western swing version of “This Land is Your Land” rang out, supporters of the newly minted State Question 835 smiled and cheered inside the Oklahoma History Center on November 19 while the state capitol building loomed through the windows in the background.

One day earlier, its proponents filed the initiative with the Oklahoma Secretary of State, formalizing years of work to change the state’s primary election system to an open one where all primary election candidates for a single county, state, or Congressional office—regardless of political affiliation—would appear together on a single ballot, with the top two vote getters advancing to the general election.

The atmosphere at this campaign kickoff event was enthusiastic and jovial, complete with red-white-and-blue signs and logos. “Under the open primary proposal, we will guarantee that all Oklahoman voters will have a choice and the right to choose the best candidate for the job,” said Margaret Kobos, founder and CEO of Oklahoma United, a nonprofit created to support election reform. “We have no doubt that party insiders will file objections and challenges. We will overcome these challenges, and we will get this petition in position for Oklahomans to sign.”

Former state senator A.J. Griffin, a supporter of SQ 835, pointed to low voter turnout as a primary motivation to change Oklahoma’s primary election system. “As a result of this closed system, the June primary elections have less than 20 percent turnout, and August runoffs generally less than 10 percent of voters participate,” Griffin said.

According to a University of Florida report, Oklahoma ranked next-to-last in turnout of its voting-eligible population during the November 5 general election, at 53.28 percent. Only Hawaii ranked lower at 50.27 percent. “Oklahoma needs more voters voting, but we also have to give our voters someone to vote for,” said Kobos, who pointed out that Oklahoma’s nearly 500,000 registered independent voters cannot vote in either Republican or Libertarian primary elections, while they are welcome to vote in Democratic primaries.

One of three proponents who signed the open primaries initiative, registered independent voter Anthony Stobbe, a 20-year U.S. Coast Guard veteran and Edmond resident, said that over half of military service members are registered independents, meaning they have no voice in Oklahoma primary elections under current law. “I choose to be an independent, but I hope you can understand it really is to me a patriotic decision. As a commissioned officer, I took an oath to the Constitution of the United States of America,” Stobbe said. “And to add insult to injury, my taxpayer dollars and your taxpayer dollars pay to fund the very election that I can’t vote in.”

The two other proponents who signed State Question 835 are Yvonne Galvan, a registered Democrat from Oklahoma City, and Kenneth Stetter, a registered Republican.

Kobos said that her group is working to qualify the open primaries initiative for the November 2026 general election, although the ballot measure wouldn’t change how that election is held.

What exactly would SQ 835 do?

SQ 835 would ask Oklahoma voters to change the state constitution, repealing its system of closed primaries for statewide, county, and both state and federal legislative offices. The initiative would not impact races for president, mayor, judges, or local school boards.

In place of closed partisan primary elections, SQ 835 would create an open primary system where all candidates appear on one primary ballot with their name and party affiliation. All lawfully registered voters may vote in the open primary. Every voter may vote for only one candidate per office. The two candidates with the most votes in a primary election move on to a general election. A candidate’s party affiliation would be whatever their voter registration says at the time they file for office.

If only two candidates file for a given office, the primary is cancelled, and they both advance to the general election. The initiative would allow for the legislature to pass laws covering how to handle a situation where one candidate withdraws from a race after advancing to the general election ballot.

Under Oklahoma’s current primary election system, only registered Republicans and Libertarians may vote in their party’s respective primary. Beginning in 2016, Democrats and independents have been eligible to vote in Democratic primaries.

Immediate backlash from GOP

It didn’t take long for the objections to come in. Republicans quickly criticized the idea of open primaries, and KPG surmises their consternation has more to do with fear of losing future elections than any notions of fair democracy. More on that soon.

Governor Kevin Stitt wrote off the initiative as sour grapes after Republicans have dominated state elections over the last two decades. “Oklahomans made decisions at the polls that these third-party groups don’t like—so now they want to upend the way we run our elections. Open primaries are a hard no in Oklahoma,” Stitt wrote on social media.

Lieutenant Governor Matt Pinnell, former Republican state party chair and state party director at the Republican National Conference, said if voters want to vote in Republican elections, they should register as Republicans. “Oklahoma is a conservative state, and Republicans hold all the statewide and federally elected positions and super majorities in the legislature for a simple reason: our values and principles represent the will of our state’s voters,” Pinnell said in a statement.

Senator David Bullard, who recently lost a hotly contested Republican Caucus race to become the next president pro tempore of the Oklahoma Senate (which wasn’t the final vote), called SQ 835 a “liberal” attempt to “disenfranchise” state Republicans. “Instead of running liberal policies like open primaries to hand our elections to the left, we should instead be focused on reforming the initiative petition process to keep out-of-state leftists from perverting our state,” Bullard said in a statement. “To protect Oklahoma, we need policies that require state question signature gatherers to collect signatures in dozens of counties, which would align with legislation I’ve filed in the past.”

Trent England of the far-right Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, an offspring of the Heritage Foundation, pushed back on the narrative that Oklahoma’s closed primary system leads to low voter turnout, pointing to past elections in California (which has top-two open primaries) as proof. “According to data from the United States Election Project, California had lower voter turnout than Oklahoma in the general elections in 2012 and 2016,” England said.

Meanwhile, Wyoming, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, with their closed primary systems, had better turnout than California in 2022, England said.

Unpacking GOP criticism

Oklahoma voters do tend to vote for Republican candidates in statewide elections. They’ve voted for a Republican in every presidential election since Richard Nixon won the state in 1968. Oklahomans haven’t elected a Democratic U.S. Senator since David Boren’s final term in 1990.

After holding the state legislature for most of state history, Democrats lost the state House to Republicans in 2006, and then the state Senate in 2008. Ever since the end of Democrat Brad Henry’s second term in January 2011, Republicans have enjoyed a trifecta of power in both legislative chambers and the executive branch. Republicans also hold every statewide elected office.

According to the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization focused on inequality in the United States, Oklahoma lawmakers have taken several actions since 2020 to make it more difficult for people to vote.

Many of Oklahoma’s elections laws are in the minority when compared to other U.S. states. The state is one of just six that still offers straight party voting (Republicans use it more than twice as much as Democrats), and one of only fourteen states and the District of Columbia where at least one major political party has a closed primary system. The Sooner state does have early voting like forty-six other states and the District of Columbia, but Oklahoma is one of four states that offers less than seven days of early voting. Oklahoma also routinely purges thousands of voter registration records from its rolls, removing people who have not voted in two consecutive general elections, and the state only recently instituted online voter registration, which forty other U.S. states already have.

On the surface, when Stitt and Pinnell say that Oklahoma’s values are represented in its election results, one could argue that our state elections are rigged to encourage the lowest turnout possible. Whether that benefits Democrats or Republicans is unclear. The adage says that higher turnout favors Democrats, but according to National Affairs, a right-leaning political journal, that is a myth.

However, KPG maintains it’s not accurate to say that Oklahoma’s state and federal legislative races are fair and, thus, demonstrative of the people’s will. One reason Republicans fare so well in Congressional and state legislative races is that the district maps are drawn by the Oklahoma Legislature. Whichever party is in power gets final say, pending gubernatorial approval.

After Kendra Horn upset Steve Russell to win Oklahoma’s fifth Congressional district in 2018 and narrowly lost to Stephanie Bice in 2020, the Republican supermajority legislature led a gerrymandering redistricting process in 2021 that nearly guarantees that a Republican will win every state Congressional race until 2030. “The state’s fifth Congressional district was re-made into a safely Republican seat, carving out much of the southside of Oklahoma City—which included approximately 80,000 Hispanic voters—and putting it into a primarily rural District 3, while adding deep-red counties to the district that Horn won,” stated a 2022 article published by the Center for Public Integrity.

In the two election cycles since new state legislative district maps were installed, the number of seats held by the two major parties has been identical: eighty-one Republicans and twenty Democrats in the House, and forty Republicans and eight Democrats in the Senate. Only a handful of the state legislative races since 2020 have been won by less than ten percentage points, and only a small number of the 149 legislative districts are considered purple.

That’s because of gerrymandering. According to the Gerrymandering Project, which does nonpartisan analysis to understand and eliminate gerrymandering at a state-by-state level, only one out of forty-eight Oklahoma Senate districts—District 40 in northwest Oklahoma City, held by Democrat Carrie Hicks—is competitive, offering both parties a fair chance to win. In the Oklahoma House of Representatives, only eight out of 101 districts are considered competitive.

Senator David Bullard’s criticism of the open primaries initiative is the most laughable. His notion that SQ 835 would “disenfranchise” Republican voters is false and, frankly, insulting to Oklahoma voters. According to the Oklahoma Election Board, as of November 1, 2024, Republicans account for 52.33 percent of Oklahoma’s registered voters, while Democrats account for 26.98 percent, independents are 19.72 percent, and Libertarians are 0.95 percent. If you added up all the state’s Democrats, Libertarians, and independents, and convinced them all to vote the same way, that still wouldn’t be enough to overcome a united Republican voting bloc. What Bullard seems to say is that extreme far-right candidates such as himself would fare worse in an open primary system, while moderate Republican candidates stand to gain the most. In KPG’s opinion, Bullard is more concerned about keeping his own job than true and fair democracy.

And Bullard’s point about requiring initiative petition signature gatherers to work around geographic restrictions requiring signatures from some or all Oklahoma counties? That’s another attempt to rig Oklahoma elections to benefit the supermajority. When Democrats ruled the state capitol, they didn’t pass laws restricting the ballot measure process. Hence, Oklahoma saw conservative ballot measures approved like legislative term limits, the Oklahoma Ethics Commission, and a constitutional amendment that says tax increases cannot be adopted unless approved by a three-fourths vote of the Legislature or a vote of the people.

To summarize, open primaries would be a welcome reform to Oklahoma’s election system. In fact, KPG thinks holding all candidates accountable to all voters would produce better elected officials and better public policies for Oklahoma.

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