Many Mississippians must have observed with envy that Californians voted last week in a "blanket" primary election with candidates of all parties on the same ballot.
Actually, what California called their blanket primary was an open primary, the idea Mississippi concocted over 30 years ago and Louisiana has had in operation the past 22 years.
The big difference is that Mississippi, being subject to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, couldn't get the open primary idea approved by the U.S. Justice Department. Louisiana somehow did get Justice clearance for its law back in 1976. Now, theirs is in trouble with the federal court.
The California primary plan has some interesting differences from what had been proposed here and what Louisiana has been doing. And those differences seem to make California's scheme more attractive, should Mississippi ever take another shot at installing an open primary.
Some rather surprising results came out of the California primary, one being that money, a whole lot of it, can't buy an election, at least in California. A multi-millionaire businessman named Al Checchi poured $40 million of his own money in trying to win the Democratic gubernatorial nod, but failed.
Instead, Democratic Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, though heavily outspent, surprised predictions and ran at the top of all vote-getters in the primary. He even edged Attorney General Dan Lundgren, the conservative Republican former congressman thought by many the favorite to win the governor's office in November.
Davis' numbers in the primary appeared to spell trouble for Lundgren come November, plus the fact that exit polls showed voters three to two wanting a change from Republican control of the governorship for the past 16 years.
One important facet of the California system, unlike Louisiana's or the one which had failed in Mississippi, both the Democrat and the Republican receiving the highest vote in the primary is guaranteed a place on the November general election ballot.
In Louisiana it's possible that two Democrats or two Republicans, if they are the top two vote getters in the October open primary, could run it off in November. Further, in the Louisiana scheme, any candidate who gets a clear majority in the open primary automatically becomes the only name put on the November general election ballot.
That's the part of Louisiana plan which caused the Supreme Court to throw out the law last December. Because congressional candidates can (and often are) "elected" in October rather than November as in the rest of the country, the court said the law was unconstitutional.
Louisiana's Legislature failed in March to correct or repeal the open primary law and now it's back in the courts. Last month a federal district judge came up with his solution, which appears to be no solution at all. His idea is to keep the existing open primary for state elections but in federal elections a primary would be held in November and then the high finishers would run it off in December.
That appears to put Louisiana back in the same stewpot with the Supreme Court, which before had objected to federal officials being elected at a different time than they are nationwide.
The same plaintiffs who brought the original suit are appealing the district judge's ruling. Interestingly, three of the four plaintiffs are Republicans. Their attorney said, however, that they were not acting on behalf of the state GOP.
Republicans in Mississippi have been up and down on the open primary idea over the years. When it first hit the Legislature in 1966, the GOP saw it as a plot to kill the budding Republican movement, and they were glad when the Justice Department rejected it.
However, by the beginning of the 1970s, Republicans liked the idea and Republican U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell in 1991 presumably cleared the law sent up by Mississippi. But when a three judge federal court in Mississippi found that the Justice Department ruling was ambiguous, it held the issue in "animated suspension." There is where it stayed beyond the 1991 elections.
A year later, when Justice reviewed the issue, this time it gave a flat disapproval of the law. Another time after that when Mississippi sent up an open primary bill, it was rejected.
What always gets Mississippi's open primary version in trouble with Justice is that the proposal would eliminate black independent candidates getting on the general election ballot by petition, a route popular with black candidates beginning in the late 1960s and in the 1970s, but less so since.
California installed its blanket primary as a result of a 1996 initiative adopted to the state constitution. The state of Washington, incidentally, has had a similar blanket primary going back for a decade or more.
Bill Minor is a syndicated columnist who covers Mississippi politics.