Pennsylvania's Cross-Filing Rule Needs to Go
Pennsylvania’s election system still allows certain political candidates to cross-file: that is, candidates can run in the primary to get on both the Democrat and Republican ticket. This is a problem, especially for candidates running for judge or school board positions. An honest look at the partisan realities of these offices should make it clear that this practice needs to be abandoned to the ash heap of Pennsylvania history.
One can legitimately question whether political parties are a good thing. Is it good to have a party label attached to each candidate voters consider, putting each politician in a partisan box rather than forcing the voter to evaluate the candidate based on his own personal merit? Maybe, maybe not. But the reality is parties do exist and they do tell us something about the candidate’s inclinations and policy preferences. Party affiliation may not be sufficient to evaluate a candidate, but it is certainly helpful.
Pennsylvania must face reality. Most voters simply will not take the time to track down individual information about every candidate, find out what each candidate thinks about the key issues, and cast a fully informed vote for every race. Yes, such highly informed voters would be the ideal in a healthy republic, but we are not even close. In the meantime, party affiliation is a useful and necessary tool. Party affiliation gives one a decent sense of where most legislative candidates stand on social and economic issues, where judge candidates stand on the proper way to interpret and apply the law, etc.
And even for citizens who want to be fully informed voters, the information isn’t always readily available. Take away party affiliation and what are you left with to judge the merits of, say, a candidate for your local school board? Some of these candidates may have no public record to speak of: they are local businessmen, dedicated community members, devoted parents. Many of them have never given a speech, published an op-Ed, or posted their political opinions on social media. Without a “D” or an “R” to identify them, voters simply don’t know anything about who many of these candidates are.
Pennsylvania election law acknowledges the reality of political parties: candidates for positions like judge and school board are not nonpartisan. There is indeed a Democrat and Republican primary; the general election still has Democrats facing off against Republicans. But Pennsylvania’s quirky system allows cross-filing: a registered Democrat can run in the Republican as well as the Democratic primary. Frankly, this makes no sense. If the practical purpose of primary elections is to let a political party choose its candidate to run in the general election, what possible justification is there for a registered member of the opposite party to have the chance to run as a party’s candidate?
This system is extremely confusing for voters. In the May primary, my Republican primary ballot had me choose between three candidates to represent the Republican Party in a race for a seat on the Northampton County Court of Common Pleas. Only one of those candidates was a registered Republican. I had to research ahead of time to make sure I knew which candidate on the ballot was actually a member of my party. There were also three Republicans on the primary ballot for school board, but I couldn’t find any helpful information about them online. I received confused text messages from friends in the days leading up to the election, asking me who they should vote for and who were the “real Republicans.” How many voters were able to do the work of ensuring they knew who these candidates were, since the ballot did not tell them the actual party affiliation of the candidates they were choosing from? How many unknowingly voted for a member of the Democratic Party to represent the Republican Party in the general election this November?
Perhaps cross-filing could be defended on the grounds that these positions should not be partisan. Yes, we choose candidates for the state legislature and executive branch based heavily on their partisan views regarding various policies. But shouldn’t the criteria be a bit different for school board members or judges? Don’t we just want people who care about their local schools on the school board? Aren’t the best judges chosen based on their integrity and legal skills rather than their political affiliation?
This reasoning might sound good, but it simply does not reflect reality, especially in the modern political era. Like it or not, political party affiliation does say something about how candidates will act in these roles.
The last couple decades have shown us that registered Republican lawyers and judges have been heavily influenced by the judicial philosophy of originalism and textualism. Judicial candidates affiliated with the GOP are much more likely to be devoted to the idea that the job of a judge is to limit his interpretation of a law to the original public meaning of the words at the time the law was enacted. Democrats generally have no such inclination and are more likely to judge the words of a law more broadly, as changing with the times and circumstances. It is true that “Democrat” or “Republican” will not tell you everything about how a judicial candidate will act on the bench. But it is a useful data point.
School boards have become highly political in recent years. There has been a strong reaction by the Republican base to sex education curricula, to “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and critical race theory in schools, and to transgender issues – such as teachers secretly using “preferred pronouns” for a student without telling a child’s parents or allowing students to use bathrooms designated for the opposite biological sex. Republicans have stood up in the face of these issues and begun to run for positions on their local school boards. Again, party affiliation is not the whole story. But it is naive to maintain that members of a school board are nonpartisan actors who simply pass budgets and work to make schools into safe, excellent learning environments. Partisan politics do play a role in how school board members function.
There is no good reason to allow cross-filing. It is offensive to the whole notion of a party primary to allow members of the opposing political party to represent a party on the ballot. It confuses voters when they do not know which candidates in a primary are actually registered members of the political party they are running to represent. It is simply not the case that these are nonpartisan positions where it is appropriate for a political candidate to run as a representative of both parties, when those parties represent very different views.
There is an easy answer to the problem: Only members of a political party should be able to run in a primary to represent that party. And no candidate should be allowed to run for office in more than one party primary. It is time for Pennsylvania to end this confusing and unhelpful practice of cross-filing and restore integrity and sanity to primary elections in Pennsylvania.
