OPINION: Alaska’s old primary system stifled governance. We shouldn’t go back to it.

When I began serving as revenue commissioner 10 years ago, I was optimistic. Because I was politically independent, appointed by an independent governor, I thought, “Surely, we can get a lot done by working equally with both parties.” How naïve I was.

Before open primaries and ranked choice voting, the old electoral system provided little independence in the working of the Legislature. Legislators worked in fear, under the threat of being ousted in the political primaries if they didn’t toe the party line. Unelected party leaders controlled party endorsements and purse strings. I recall a particular meeting with a legislator who tearfully admitted they knew they should vote to advance a sustainable fiscal plan but couldn’t — for fear the party would actively work against them.

Under the old system of closed primaries, the parties themselves carried more weight in legislators’ decision-making processes than the constituents who put them in office. That implicit party control combined with the need to appeal to the party “base” in the closed primary system manifested in bad governance. Promises were made and not kept because party leadership knew the truth was a bad election strategy.

The goal was to win; not govern. Hard decisions that required statesmanship were punished. Governing became little more than an exercise in throwing political hand grenades at the opposition, blaming others for their problems, and saying no to everything so they would be accountable for nothing. The result: Nothing got done. In the case of the fiscal plan, nothing got fixed until we spent our savings at a dangerously low level.

The 2019 stalemate is a stark example of the failure of the old system: It took the State House 31 days to organize. When several Republican statesmen prioritized the good of the state and negotiated a bipartisan coalition so work could get done, they were vilified, labeled as “RINOs” (Republicans in name only), and two were ousted by more hardline Republicans in the 2020 primary.

Is it any surprise, then, that the electorate chose to pass election reform in 2020 to open political primaries and allow for ranked choice voting? As November approaches and political pundits and party hardliners try to convince you that ranked choice voting is a travesty, remember how impossible effective governance was under the old system, how bad the closed primary system was for representative government, and how little control we the electorate had in the decision-making process before we had open primaries and RCV.

Randy Hoffbeck served as Revenue Commissioner under Gov. Bill Walker.

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