Anyone who has done that work knows how hard it is to get people to vote in communities too often ignored by political systems. It takes trust, language access, and conversations in neighborhoods, businesses, on radio, in newspapers, online, and face to face.
That is why the 15 percent rule, requiring candidates to earn at least 15 percent of delegate votes at the party convention to make it onto the primary ballot, is so troubling. In communities like Boston, Chelsea, Revere, Everett, Lynn, and Lawrence, many voters are unenrolled and balancing work, family, language access, and daily pressures. They are not spending weekends navigating caucuses and convention rules. But they still deserve real choices when they vote.
This is not about delegates, many of whom are good people. This is about democracy. Let voters decide.
Alberto Vasallo III
President and CEO
El Mundo Boston
Revere
Parties ought to be free to set their own priorities
Your call for Massachusetts parties to scrap the rule requiring 15 percent support from state convention delegates because it is “antidemocratic” shows a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy. The essence of democracy is competitive choice between parties, not the form of nomination — whether through a primary election or otherwise — before that choice gets made. As the political scientist E.E. Schattschneider wrote in 1942, “Democracy is not to be found in the parties but between the parties.”
Party conventions, a venerable part of American democracy, are raucous exercises in mass civic life worthy of celebration, especially by those who worry about our fraying civic bonds.
Electoral reform in some form or another has much to recommend it, but it should not weaken parties’ ability to set their own priorities and ensure a modicum of support for their own nominees.
Daniel Schlozman
Chilmark
The writer, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, is a former member of the Massachusetts Democratic State Committee and coauthor of “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.”
‘I was done in by the 15 percent rule’ in 2002
I was done in by the 15 percent rule. Until the state Democratic convention in June 2002, I was a candidate for lieutenant governor of the Commonwealth. The established leaders of the party at that time apparently wanted nothing to do with someone running as a Clean Elections candidate. I was viewed as an outsider who had not paid her dues.
My campaign collected the required nomination paper signatures as well as an extra 5,000 signatures, each with a $5 to $100 contribution, as required under the Clean Elections law. That requirement was no easy task. For eight months I traveled all over the state speaking with groups both large and small.
Then came the convention. I spoke. The vote was taken. I was done. A photograph of me speaking at the convention appeared in the Globe the next day with an article that reported that of “13 candidates competing for three statewide offices,” I was the only one kept off the ballot.
The people never had a chance to decide whether a labor arbitrator and mediator and school board member might have had something more than allegiance to the party to offer.
Sarah Cannon Holden
Lincoln
The writer recently retired as town moderator. She has also served on the town’s Select Board and Finance Committee and on the Lincoln-Sudbury School Committee.
