State Rep. Ernie Yarbrough (R-Trinity) will file legislation on Thursday to close primary elections in Alabama.
Open primaries allow voters to participate in party primaries without being registered members of that party. Closed primaries generally require a voter to be a registered party member to vote in the election.
Under existing law, Alabama is an open primary state. There is no state law requiring a voter to register his or her party affiliation when registering to vote. The bill would allow a voter to register a political party affiliation. According to a draft copy, the bill would require a voter to be registered with a political party to vote that party's ballot in a primary election or a primary runoff election. The bill would prohibit an elector from changing his or her political party affiliation during a blackout period beginning 60 days before a primary election.
The topic of closed primaries has garnered new interest in recent weeks due to leaked audio of an internal House Republican caucus meeting where House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter (R-Rainsville) said, "I could give a shit about the Republican Party." The comment came after a caucus discussion over former House Majority Leader Scott Stadthagen (R-Hartselle) running for Alabama Republican Party chairman. Ledbetter later told 1819 News after the audio was leaked he wholeheartedly supports the Republican Party and that his priority was getting every Republican member of the Alabama House reelected and growing the party's supermajority.
Yarbrough told 1819 News on Wednesday, "It is my understanding that there is support for opening the discussion to move the bill forward in the House, and it's also my understanding that there is support for carrying the bill and moving the bill in the Senate."
The bill is titled the Safeguard Alabama Voter Engagement (SAVE) Act.
"If our voters are going to engage in the election system, they want to engage in a way that they know that their vote counts and that what they're voting for in their primaries is going to accurately represent what they believe that party platform stands for. I think it's the right thing to do. It's my understanding that there is a desire and openness and willingness to move this forward in both the House and the Senate to get this done hopefully this session," Yarbrough said. "I think it's needed for the state because from the time that I was a young person involved in Young Republicans or knocking doors, being taught what we believe as conservatives and as Republicans that Republicans were supposed to pick the people who best represented Republican and conservative values. If you fast forward to the whole discussion now in terms of the SAVE Act in DC, and not having illegal aliens vote in our elections. The reason why we don't want illegal aliens voting in our elections is because if they do, it dilutes the intended purpose of the voter bloc that is actually meant to be represented in the vote. I feel like it's the same situation here because if we have undocumented Democrats voting in the GOP primary, what happens is that the people who are elected potentially are not going to actually reflect the GOP party platform that we all ran on. If we're going to preserve the integrity, the Republican Party values and platform, we need to put forth candidates who most accurately reflect the values of the party platform as a Republican in Alabama. By having a closed primary, you're helping to ensure to the best reasonable account possible that the person that wins the Republican primary most accurately reflects the GOP party values that I was raised as a young person to believe is what Republicans and conservatives believe."
If passed into law, the bill would go into effect on January 1, 2027.
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