Sure, let’s have a presidential primary election in Kansas — but make sure it counts | Opinion

You and I will get a chance to vote in a presidential primary election next year.

That’s good, and after 25 years in Kansas, I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like.

But, we may not get to vote before the nominations are decided, which would make our primaries a meaningless gesture and waste of state money.

Let me explain.

On Friday, Gov. Laura Kelly signed Senate Substitute for House Bill 2053. It sets the stage for Kansas voters, Republican or Democrat, to weigh in on their party’s selection of nominees for president in an official election — state-funded and run by state and county election officials.

It’s about time.

Point of fact, a voter who cast a ballot in the last official Kansas presidential primary will be at least 50 years old by the time they get to do it again.

The last presidential primary here was in 1992. Bill Clinton won the Democrats and George Bush (the first one) won the Republicans.

Kansas has had a law on the books requiring a presidential primary since 1978. But my only memories are of sitting in the Legislature watching it get canceled every four years because of cost and because we were so late on the primary calendars that it really wouldn’t have mattered who we voted for.

Senate Substitute for House Bill 2053 solves one problem, allocating the funds for a primary, estimated at $4 million to $5 million.

But the new law might still need some work if Kansas is to have a legitimate voice in the presidential nominating process.

The bill establishes March 19, 2024, as our primary day. In all probability, the primary season will be over by then.

Nationally, the primary process for 2024 is more front-loaded than it has ever been.

California, the largest and traditionally last state to hold its primaries, has been moved up to Super Tuesday, March 5.

As things stand now, at least 19 and as many as 23 states will have their primaries ahead of Kansas, including vote-rich behemoths like Texas, North Carolina, Georgia and Michigan.

I discussed this with Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau of Wichita, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee, which handled the bill.

She told me that hearing testimony had indicated that the secretary of state could move the election in the interest of relevance if necessary.

But then she called Bryan Caskey, the secretary’s election director, and he told her that’s not the case. In the final bill, the primary is set in stone for March 19 and can’t be changed without further legislation.

It might be a good idea for the Legislature to consider cleaning that up with a trailer bill when it comes back for the annual wrap-up session on Monday.

The national parties can penalize a state and reduce its delegates if it jumps ahead of their calendar. But at least some voice in the nomination would be better than no voice at all.

The one certainty here is that the current system, party-run caucuses, is badly broken. It excludes many voters who are elderly or disabled, along with anyone else who can’t travel to a potentially distant meeting hall and invest half a day in a political meeting.

Turnout for caucuses is dismal and heavily weighted toward the extremes.

The last three Republican caucuses have been won by uber-conservatives whose campaigns were on their last legs by the time they got here: Kansas picked Mike Huckabee over John McCain in 2008, Rick Santorum over Mitt Romney in 2012 and Ted Cruz over Donald Trump in 2016. The GOP didn’t caucus at all in 2020.

Kansas Democrats picked Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in 2008, Obama was uncontested in 2012 and Bernie Sanders beat Clinton here in 2016. In 2020, the year of the pandemic, the Democrats experimented with a private primary of sorts, a mail-in election using ranked-choice voting. Joe Biden prevailed over Sanders.

An authentic and official primary is long overdue. The system we have now squelches too many voices too often.

So by all means, let’s have a primary in 2024.

But let’s do it right, so voting for president doesn’t continue to be the epic waste of time that we’ve grown used to these past 30 years.

Dion Lefler: 316-268-6527, @DionKansas