Washington Post (Opinion): Maryland needs special elections to fill state legislative vacancies

These political party insiders are organized in “central committees.” Over the past several years, they have quietly wielded so much power that more than 20 percent of Maryland state legislators were initially appointed rather than elected by the voters and have benefited from incumbency advantage ever since. Can you imagine the public pushback if 20 percent of our U.S. House of Representatives were appointed rather than elected?

These vacancies are often filled by the insiders themselves. It happened Tuesday when the Montgomery County Democratic Central Committee nominated its chair to fill a House of Delegates vacancy in a fall season full of similar situations. Two months ago, the chair of the Prince George’s County Democratic Central Committee was nominated by that central committee to a vacancy without much contention. That central committee has anointed people to fill three state legislative vacancies in recent weeks — and how many voters noticed? Perhaps most egregious of recent cases was last year, when the chair of a Baltimore district’s seven-person Democratic Central Committee broke a tie by voting for herself to fill a House of Delegates vacancy — and defeating the runner-up candidate from the most recent House of Delegates election who had actually bothered to campaign for that seat and earn voter support for it.

When members of Democratic Central Committees — quite a few of whom either ran for their position unopposed or were appointed themselves, at least in Montgomery County — choose their chair to fill a vacancy over the person whom the voters literally determined to be the next best choice, it’s no question “whether the process does enough to consider voters’ voices,” as the Baltimore Sun put it. The process as it stands empowers central committee insiders with choices that voters should make — choices that voters make in many other states. “The central committee does hold all the power,” Joanne Antoine, the executive director of Common Cause Maryland, has said. Common Cause Maryland is just one Maryland organization that supports reform.