Special election will close La.'s open primaries;

For 30 years, Louisiana voters have been free to choose their congressional candidates with blithe disregard for political parties. The "open primary" system made it so.

That will end March 8 with the special election to succeed outgoing U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal, R-Kenner. After decades of legislative dustups and even a 1997 U.S. Supreme Court decision, state lawmakers shuttered the open primary system for races to elect the state's U.S. senators and representatives.

The new law took effect Jan. 1. The race for the 1st Congressional District will be the Louisiana electorate's first test of the closed system since 1976. Only Republican voters will be allowed to cast ballots in the GOP primary. Democrats and voters with no official party affiliation are the only ones who may participate in the Democratic primary.

The reversion will not be smooth, poll watchers predict. Only the most ardent political observers seem to see it coming. There has been no rush to register with either major party this year, and voters have had little experience with closed primaries. The youngest voters to engage in the last closed congressional primary are now 49 years old.

"I think it's going to be a big shakeout here," said Ed Renwick, a political science professor at Loyola University. "I think there's going to be a lot of confrontations" at the polls.

After Jindal was elected Oct. 20 to succeed Kathleen Blanco as the state's 61st governor, he announced he would leave Congress on Jan. 14, the day he becomes Louisiana's chief executive. Blanco then called a special election for his successor in Congress.

Party primaries will be held March 8. Should either party not bestow 50 percent of the vote on one candidate, then its two top vote-getters will enter a runoff on April 5. The party victors, along with unaffiliated and third-party candidates, would then square off in a general election on May 3. If neither major party needs a runoff, the general election will be April 5.

For the first time since open primaries were introduced, the new system will allow a candidate to win the general election with a plurality of votes, even if that is less than half.

So far five candidates have registered with the Federal Elections Commission to vie for the seat, including Republicans Steve Scalise of Jefferson, John Young of Metairie, Ben Morris of Slidell and Tim Burns of Mandeville. Gilda Reed of Metairie remains the only Democrat in the field.

The official sign-up period is Jan. 29-31.

Unaffiliated voters

Louisiana recognizes five political parties: Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green and Reform. The latter three do not hold primaries, according to the secretary of state's office.

When they register, voters may choose one of these parties or not designate a party at all, thus remaining unaffiliated.

For voters in the 1st District, the March 8 primary will present a change that could affect many of them, especially conservative Democrats who habitually support Republicans. They, along with everyone else not registered as a Republican, won't be allowed to vote in the GOP primary.

"It boiled down to: The state central committee felt the people who were registered Republicans had the right to make the decision, not independents," GOP state Chairman Roger Villere said.

The Democratic Party closed its primary to voters registered with the other four recognized parties, but it is allowing unaffiliated voters to participate. That could swell the turnout in the Democratic primary. Louisiana has more than 200,000 unaffiliated voters: 98 times the number registered with the Green, Libertarian and Reform parties combined.

"We want everybody to participate in our primary," Democratic state Chairman Chris Whittington said. "I don't understand why they did that."

The law gives the two major parties until Tuesday to change their rules, but Villere and Whittington said they will stay the course.

Voters, however, have until Feb. 6 to pick a party and still vote March 8.

Registration numbers have not changed substantially since the law went into effect, leaving analysts to surmise that those who wanted to switch have already done so or that voters are simply unaware of the new law.

Conservative voters

The 1st District has a long history as a conservative bastion in a reputably conservative state. Spanning Lake Pontchartrain to include all or part of six southeast Louisiana parishes, the district has sided with a GOP candidate in every election since open primaries began in 1978, even though almost 73 percent of the district's registered voters are either Democrat or unaffiliated.

Such a legacy could allow the Republican nominee to win the 2008 special election almost by default, essentially leaving the decision in the hands of little more than a third of the registered voters, those registered with the GOP.

"In this race, we're talking about the Republican nomination could be the sign of victory. Period," Renwick said.

In Washington Parish, that scenario is displayed in high relief. In the past three 1st District contests, Republicans have taken no less than 66 percent of the vote. However, 64 percent of the parish's voters are registered Democrats, signaling that many crossed party lines to vote for David Vitter in 2002 and Jindal in 2004 and 2006.

Whether the March closed primary will trigger a mad dash of party-switching before the deadline is an almost unanswerable question, Washington Registrar of Voters Charlotte Erwin said.

"I guess I really don't know. It's been so long since we had this," she said. "We'll have a lot of people . . . changing their parties, if they're aware of it. People . . . up on the news, they will know. But in our parish the majority will not know, probably, so we'll have to see what happens."

Races decided too early

The Louisiana primary, a national eponym for the open election system long considered an oddity by political scientists, came about with the rise of Edwin Edwards, the former governor now imprisoned for racketeering.

After running three highly expensive campaigns -- a Democratic primary, a Democratic runoff and a general election -- to win the governorship in 1972, Edwards persuaded the Legislature to abolish closed primaries. Under the novel system, all candidates would run in a single primary regardless of party affiliation. If no one took 50 percent of the vote, then the two top vote-getters would face each other a month later.

The first local and statewide open primaries were held in 1975. Congressional races for the U.S. House and Senate followed three years later.

State Rep. Charlie Lancaster of Metairie, a major architect of the modern Louisiana GOP, saw nothing but blatant self-preservation behind open primaries. Office-holders used the high visibility of their posts to steamroll competition adulterated by too many candidates entering primary races, he argued.

"It's the best incumbent-protection system in the United States," he said.

Lancaster's disdain for open primaries is in some ways antithetical. After all, many politicos credit the odd electoral system with bestowing a historically languid GOP with relevance in Louisiana. Republican candidates suddenly could cater to conservative Democratic voters.

"It wasn't good for any party, although it was going to be better for us than the Democrats," Lancaster said.

Opposition to open primaries ebbed and flowed for the next three decades, as lawmakers pitched and killed legislation to return to closed primaries. Then, in 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in.

The high court declared Louisiana's open primary system unconstitutional at the federal level. With more than 80 percent of its congressional races being decided in the October primary, Louisiana was unlawfully electing its congressional delegation a month before the rest of the country, the court determined.

To conform with the ruling, the Legislature shifted the primaries by a month to hold the first round of balloting November, with any runoffs scheduled for December.

That system held for nearly 10 years before Sen. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, sponsored legislation in 2006 to return the primaries to party control. A request to interview Fields went unreturned.

Local elections and races for statewide seats remain unchanged by the new law.

'Arrogant' decision

The resurrection of closed federal primaries came from both edges of the political divide. Villere and Whittington, the state party chiefs, said they joined forces to move it through the Legislature.

Both shared the philosophy that open primaries weakened political parties. Close the primaries, strengthen the parties, they said.

"It becomes more of a two-party system, and it produces the best (candidate) of each one," Whittington said.

Villere took that thought a step further, hypothesizing that the presence of multiple candidates from one party in an open race undercuts a strong, unified party vote.

"With the open primary we were kind of cannibalizing our own candidates," he said.

The two chairmen split, however, on predicting the long-term mark of the closed primary system.

Villere estimated it will take be two election cycles before any permanent change on the 1st District electorate becomes visible. However, he predicted it could catalyze an influx of conservative Democrats into the GOP.

Whittington disagreed.

"I think you're going to have some surprised voters who are going to show up and find they can't vote in the Republican primary and go to the Democratic Party," said Whittington, who called the GOP decision to keep its primary within the party "arrogant."

"I don't think it's arrogant at all," Villere said. "There was a lot of debate on that, and it was something that wasn't decided on at one meeting."

Similarly, the election rules are not absolute. The parties may choose to open their primaries to unaffiliated voters before Jan. 1 of each federal election year.

"We're not locked into it," Villere said of the closed GOP primary. "This is an experiment."

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Richard Rainey can be reached at rrainey@timespicayune.com or (504) 883-7052.