This article was republished with permission from WTOP’s news partners at Maryland Matters. Sign up for Maryland Matters’ free email subscription today.
An Anne Arundel County Circuit Court judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by unaffiliated Maryland voters, who argued that the state’s closed primary elections infringe on their voting rights.
In her ruling last week, Circuit Judge Pamela K. Alban wrote that the state’s precedent is clear, based on prior cases that affirmed political parties’ rights to exclude unaffiliated voters from their primary elections.
“While the Maryland Constitution and Declaration of Rights guarantee the right to vote in state elections, neither grants the right to vote in a political party’s primary without affiliating with that party,” Alban wrote.
An attorney for the voters who brought the suit, Boyd Rutherford, the former lieutenant governor to Gov. Larry Hogan (R), vowed to appeal Alban’s ruling.
“While we would like to have had a chance to fully brief the merits of our case in Circuit Court, our appeal will get the Constitutional questions before the Appellant Courts quicker,” Rutherford (R) said in a statement to Maryland Matters.
The Maryland Attorney General’s Office decined to comment Wedneday on the dismissal of the case.
Alban’s ruling was expected to be appealed — no matter which side she landed on. She said as much during a late-October motions hearing in Annapolis.
“I imagine no matter what I do, this may not be the end,” Alban told the courtroom then.
Maryland is one of 18 states with either completely closed or partially closed primaries, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures,
The Maryland voters filed their lawsuit challenging Maryland’s system in May, and a few months later, the Maryland State Board of Elections, represented by the state attorney general’s office, filed a motion to dismiss the case on various grounds.
During a late October hearing in Annapolis, Alban ruled partially in favor of the aggrieved voters, determining that they had legal standing to sue.
But Alban waited to rule on the merits of the case, and to determine whether the voters had stated a claim that could proceed. During her questioning, Alban hinted that she was skeptical of the voters’ case.
In their arguments, attorneys for the voters tried to make the argument that their case was distinct from two prior Maryland Supreme Court deicisohns that validated closed primaries: Hennegan v. Geartner in 1946 and Suessman v. Lamone in 2004.
But Alban disagreed.
“Plaintiffs’ constitutional claims fall squarely within the scope of the holdings in Seussmann and Hennegan. They assert rights that, under Maryland law, they do not possess,” she wrote.
Alban ruled that although the Suessman case was focused on a primary election for circuit court judge, it still applied, because the court relied on the notion that Maryland voters are not entitled to participate in partisan primaries.
In the Hennegan case, a petitioner challenged a prior version of the state’s elections code, which prohibited party changes six months before a primary. The court ruled that because the petitioner did not have a constitutional right to participate in a party primary, the state law was valid.
As such, Alban ruled that both cases prove that the precedent in Maryland is that citizens have no constitutionally protected right to vote in primaries, and Rutherford’s case should be dismissed.
“They have failed to state a legally cognizable claim that their right to vote has been infringed,” Alban wrote.
