The plot thickens with cross-over voting in Georgia primaries | Bill Cotterell
Dems cheating for a Stacy Win
Our neighbors to the north are providing an entertaining demonstration of the electoral mischief that can occur when a state has open primaries.
We won’t know what the practice of “crossover” voting means until May 24, when results of the Georgia primaries are tabulated. It might not be decisive, unless the two biggest Republican races are very close, but election analysts will be puzzling for a long time about different reasons some Georgians would want to cross party lines.
In any event, it’s enough to make you glad that Florida voters narrowly rejected an open-primaries constitutional amendment that was on the ballot in 2020. Although both major parties opposed it, that one came close, supported by 57% of the voters — just short of the three-fifths majority required for constitutional amendments.
It seems that a significant segment of Georgia Democrats — more precisely, participants in the 2020 Democratic primaries — are casting ballots in that state’s Republican primaries during early voting this year. A far smaller number of Republicans are choosing to meddle in the Democratic races.
In Georgia, you aren’t bound by party membership. You go into the polling place and they ask if you want a Democrat or Republican ballot. You can’t vote in both, but any registered voter can pick a team.
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution’s numbers cruncher, Mark Niesse, went through themassive turnout of early voting and calculated that 7% of voters in the state’s Republican primaries this year had chosen Democratic ballots in 2020. That’s about 16,000 votes, out of 237,000 Republican ballots cast at that point.
By contrast,less than 1% of voters in this year’s Republican primariescast their ballots in Democratic contests two years ago.
The wonders of modern computer technology make it possible to match up voters and their ballots by number, but there’s no way of knowing who those crossover voters voted for — or why they switched.
Maybe a lot of Georgians who normally vote Democratic wanted to get the GOP to nominate its weaker candidate for governor, setting him up to lose in November to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. She narrowly lost in 2018 to Gov. Brian Kemp, who’s up for re-election in one of the nation’s most-watched races.
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/opinion/2022/05/19/plot-thickens-cross-over-voting-georgia-primaries-bill-cotterell/9816948002/