Brandon Waltens - Texas Scorecard Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Six point two now here in Houston's voting News. It's
closing time for Texas GOP primaries. Brandon Waltons joins us
at the Texas Scorecard. I know the Republican Party had
talked about doing it. What took them so hard?

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Well, I mean a lot of it was waiting on
the legislature right to pass a law that would do this,
which will probably be the easier way to do it.
Just as a matter of background, right now, we currently
have open primaries in Texas, which means that if you're
going to vote the primary election, essentially you come and
you say, you know, on the day of I want
to vote in the Republican primary or I want to
vote the Democrat primary, which means that basically you can

(00:40):
you know, vote in one one year, vote in the
other the other year. As a practical consideration, what it
actually means is that we have seen in many races
that you have some races decided because you have Democrat
voters voting in the Republican primary to vote for the
less conservative candidate, especially in like a safe red disc
church where they think their vote will matter more.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah, but does this solve that though, Brandan because when
if you have in that scenario, you could be a
Democrat and still vote in the Republican primary. You just
can't vote in the Democrat primary. But maybe he didn't
need to vote the Democrat primary because there's only one
person running, or or you know that that person doesn't
stand a chance of winning anyway unless you have a

(01:23):
weaker Republican candidate running, exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
And that's the situation we have now, and so that's
why a lot of people have pushed for closed primaries
like we have in several other states, where essentially it's
not a huge barrier, but you need to register with
the party, right say, okay, now I'm actually a registered Republican.
I'm a registered Democrat. You register with the Secretary of
State and then you're actually affiliated that way. Not some

(01:51):
people say, well a Democrat could register as a Republican. Well,
certainly they could, but you know, I think it's just
you know, trying to be one step, one way to
try to filter out some of these people who come
on the day of and say, oh wait, now I
want to vote in the Republican primary. This is something that,
like I said, with easier done by legislation. But as

(02:13):
you can imagine a lot of the manufactors of open
primaries are the people who are in the legislature, and
so as such, we didn't see any legislation move in
either the House or the Senate this last session, and
the party is saying, well, we think we can actually
implement this ourselves. We know that there's probably going to
be some legal action against it, but they are pressing forward.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
All right, Well, we'll see if there's a lawsuit involved
in all this. You know, the primaries are not very
well attended by voters to begin with. It's pretty select
crowd that shows up to vote for primaries. Is there
any concern that by adding this extra hoop of having
to officially register with a state with one party or another,
you're going to have people who are just not going

(02:58):
to take the time or forget to do something like that,
and therefore the attendance for voting at the primary is
going to go down even further than what it already is.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Well, I think if if this is in place in
the upcoming primaries in twenty twenty six, which is the
first year that this would be applicable, I think we'll
see what, you know, what effect if any of this
has on it. I think there are a lot of
people who you know, want to make sure want to
vote the Republican primary, but want to make sure that
their vote counts and is not canceled out by Democrat

(03:27):
voters trying to sabotage their own votes.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Good point, Brandon, thanks for joining. I appreciate it. Brandon
Walton's at Texas scorecard is six twenty six