AZ Mirror
August 7, 2024
By Tahda A. Ahtone
Free enterprise is essential for our capitalistic economy. It gives entrepreneurs the opportunity to start businesses, work hard, be successful and grow local economies.
Under this system all businesses, small and large, compete on a level playing field, and consumers have the freedom of choice.
Supporters of these free enterprise principles that welcome competition, and encourage choice, should support extending these practices beyond the business world and into our political system. These concepts fuel economic vitality and would reinvigorate our democracy.
Unfortunately, that is not the case in Arizona.
All political candidates, regardless of party or no party, should be allowed to compete fairly for the support of the voters. All voters should have the freedom to select from all candidates who they deem best suited for the job. Opposition driven by fear of real competition should not stand in the way of these electoral freedoms.
Why, then, is a group touting the name “Arizona Free Enterprise Club,” which claims to espouse free enterprise in our economy, working to block these very principles from being applied to our electoral system?
The Arizona Free Enterprise Club has filed a lawsuit to stop the Make Elections Fair Act that would infuse our elections with the fundamentals of free enterprise: freedom to compete and freedom to choose. The citizen-led ballot initiative would abolish closed partisan primaries that deny these basic American freedoms to candidates and voters.
Independent voters face hurdles to cast a primary ballot. Unaffiliated candidates have no access to primary ballots and are required to gather up to six times the number of signatures compared to partisan counterparts just to be listed on the general election ballots.
In addition to freedom for office-seekers to compete and freedom for voters to choose from all candidates, voters have another reason to support open primaries.
All taxpayers are stuck bankrolling partisan primaries that exclude all independent candidates and dissuade most independent voters from casting a ballot. Clearly, this is taxpayer-funded discrimination based solely on party affiliation.
A fairer system would eliminate these barriers and create open primaries where all candidates for a public office compete under the same rules and appear on the same ballot, and all voters regardless of party affiliation have equal access to participate in the elections that their tax dollars support.
More than 559,000 Arizonans signed petitions to put the open primaries measure on the November ballot, far surpassing the required 383,923 signatures. The public’s support for this initiative is clear.
But those aiming to preserve the current closed partisan primary system are working to keep electoral discrimination alive by denying the freedom to compete and choose.
And the Arizona Free Enterprise Club is not alone in that regard.
A panel of state legislators, responsible for distributing unbiased information to all registered voters before the election, is attempting to mislead and confuse voters about the open primaries ballot measure by approving an intentionally biased description.
Make Elections Fair Arizona is in a legal battle against both the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and the state legislature to protect and improve the electoral freedom Arizonans deserve. Instead of allowing voters to decide in November on implementing free enterprise principles in our election, opponents seek to prevail in the courts.
Those who support democracy, freedom to compete and freedom of choice are holding their breath.
Tahda A. Ahtone is the president of JackRabbit Development LLC in Tempe and a leader of the Business for Democracy-AZ collaborative, a campaign of the American Sustainable Business Network.
Why are some backers of ‘free enterprise’ so afraid of the marketplace of ideas in elections?