Editor’s note: An earlier reference in this article to Ballot PA Action being affiliated with the Committee of Seventy was incorrect.
Is Pennsylvania’s ban on independent voters participating in party primary elections unconstitutional?
That’s the question a group of independents is asking the state Commonwealth Court to consider in a new filing announced Wednesday.
Ballot PA Action praised the filing by their chairman David Thornburgh, TV and radio host Michael Smerconish and three other Pennsylvanians.
“After 88 years of being treated as second-class Pennsylvania citizens, 1.4 million independent voters will finally get our day in court,” said Thornburgh, the son of former Republican Pennsylvania Gov. Dick Thornburgh, according to a statement.
The plaintiffs, Thornburgh said, “are confident in our argument that a state constitution that promises to treat all voters equally will no longer permit this political discrimination to continue.”
An earlier petition filed with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in July was denied in August.
Ballot PA Action’s statement said testimony from a Carnegie Mellon University mathematics professor made the latest filing “unique.”
CMU professor Wesley Pegden, the group said, analyzed election data from state House and Senate races from 2002 to 2020, school board elections in the counties where the plaintiffs live, and mayor and other elections for large counties in Pennsylvania.
Pegden “measured voter influence, which corresponds to the number of votes that would have to change in an election to flip the final outcome of that election,” Ballot PA Action said. “The lower the number of votes necessary, the more an individual vote matters.”
Democratic and Republicans voters’ influence is greater than independents’ since they get to vote in primaries and general elections, the group said.
Ballot PA Action said Pegden determined the median influence of a Democratic voter in legislative elections between 2002 to 2012 is 1.7 times the influence of an independent voter while a Republican voter’s influence is 1.8 times greater.
Independent voters’ influence is only equal to partisan voters’ influence in uncontested primaries and general elections, Pegden found.
“In other words, the only elections in which independent voters have equal electoral influence to partisan voters (are) when no voters have any choice at all,” Ballot PA Action said.