Primary elections don’t serve their purpose. Let’s get rid of them.

This month in Harrisburg, former elected officials and government experts debated before a panel of state lawmakers whether to change Pennsylvania’s primary elections. Specifically, whether to switch from a closed primary, in which only registered Democrats and Republicans can pick the Democratic and Republican nominees, respectively, to an open primary, where anyone, no matter their party, can vote for each party’s nominee. Credit should go to those state legislators who want to fix a system that has not worked especially well in recent years.

But the real problem in our political system is not open primaries vs. closed primaries; it is having primaries in the first place.

» READ MORE: The Pa. voting system is primed to produce candidates like Doug Mastriano

Pennsylvania is one of only nine states that still uses fully closed primaries. That makes this state an outlier, but America is an even greater outlier in having primary elections at all. Other countries forgo primaries altogether and they get better political candidates as a result.

Primary elections are an innovation of the Progressive Era in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and have been with us for so long that Americans often forget we spent much of our political history without them. When you think about the purpose of a nomination, it seems strange that we have them at all.

Both closed and open primaries have their problems. In a closed system, registered party members participate in low-information popularity contests, which can encourage the rise of extreme candidates. But letting nonparty members participate only adds confusion — and the potential for chicanery — to the process.

“Both closed and open primaries have their problems.”

Gaining the nomination of a party means that a party organization endorses this person as their candidate. That seems like a private decision by that party. But in an open primary state, anyone — even a person who actively opposes all the party’s goals — can vote. That could mean hijacking the nomination in favor of someone who does not really represent the party. Or it could mean actively working for the nomination of the worst candidates in the hopes that they will lose. (We have already seen in Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial primary how Josh Shapiro’s campaign did this through ads designed to help Doug Mastriano. Open primaries would make similar trickery even easier.)

Allowing those who are not members of political parties a chance to vote would allow a broader section of the populace to have a say, sure. But it would also mean that the values of the organization would be ignored if some candidate could bring in enough outside votes.

Even members of political parties don’t always love every aspect of the party itself, but they at least have enough of an interest in it to join. Inviting nonmembers into that process just degrades it. Open primaries will do away with just about the last reason parties have to exist.

Many will be tempted to say “good riddance” to our political parties. Depending on which day you ask me, I might be one of them. Neither major party has covered itself in glory lately, and they often do more to protect corrupt insiders than to promote new and competent candidates.

So why should the government continue to fund their nominating processes?

Consider how candidates are nominated in Canada. A party’s local chapter accepts applications (and sometimes conducts a search) and thoroughly vets candidates to ensure they will uphold party values before holding a nominating meeting. They schedule a vote — any dues-paying party member in the district can participate — and the winner is the nominee. Simple, local, and far more likely to result in the choice of someone who is at the center of the local party members’ views.

Could that work here? Parties nominated candidates without primaries for many years, and sometimes still do. Statewide nominations require a little more than the simple local meetings, but we have done that successfully here, too.

Take Virginia, where parties can choose if they want to select a nominee via an open primary run by the state or a convention run by the party, which gives delegates time for reasoned discussion, just as at local nomination meetings. In 2021, the Old Dominion GOP opted for the latter, and in a surprise, 53,000 registered delegates nominated Glenn Youngkin, a moderate businessman.

No approach is perfect. The primary system was introduced because many progressives thought conventions had become tools of the powerbrokers and their backroom deals. But how different are primaries now, when a rich candidate can flood the zone with advertising and squeak through a crowded field, as Democrat Dan Goldman did in a New York congressional primary last week?

Conventions, combined with lowered ballot access requirements, could make it cheaper and easier to nominate better candidates. The taxpayer would pay nothing, the parties — funded perhaps by donations or dues — could choose who they like, and if the people were still dissatisfied, it would be that much easier to hold a convention and nominate a third-party challenger.

Primaries have become flawed and dysfunctional on the taxpayer’s dime. Privately funded conventions could restore some fiscal and political sanity to the system.

Kyle Sammin is editor-at-large at Broad + Liberty.