Irresponsible effort

Some Arkansas legislators want to have an early presidential primary in 2020. They say that the “SEC Primary” in 2016 was a great success. Maybe so. But SB445 would complicate and disrupt the entire electoral calendar for state, county, and local offices. That would be unnecessary, irresponsible, and downright bad for the democratic process.

SB445 would have the effect of an incumbent protection act. By moving all of the deadlines forward for candidates to run for office, any potential challengers—from their own or other political parties—have to make that decision unreasonably early.

The statistics bear it out. It’s bad enough that over half of the current members of the Arkansas General Assembly faced no competition in the 2018 general election, but go back to 2016 when we had early primaries. Challengers had to step forward over a year before the general election, and few did. In the November election, fully two-thirds of the seats up for election in the General Assembly were uncontested. Had it not been for Libertarians, that would have been nearly three-quarters!

Set a separate date for a special presidential primary, if you must. But the integrity and competitiveness of our state and local elections should not be sacrificed for such a beauty contest. MICHAEL PAKKO

Roland Michael Pakko is chairman of the Libertarian Party of Arkansas.