Ian Lind's article in Civil Beat on the Democratic party of Hawaii suing for a closed primary

[mahina]

http://www.civilbeat.com/posts/2013/06/19/19340-hawaii-monitor-primarily-politics/

The first four paragraphs are here but the article and comments are worth reading, as is Ian Lind's blog, ilind.net.
Hawaii Monitor: Primarily Politics
By Ian Lind 06/19/2013

Hawaii State Elections Office
The Democratic Party of Hawaii has taken the politically risky step of asking a federal judge to throw out a provision of the state constitution protecting the “secrecy of voting” and the confidentiality of voters’ party affiliations.

The lawsuit filed this week by the Democratic Party of Hawaii challenges the state’s open primary election system, and is creating a very strange spectacle of the dominant political party apparently engaged in a civil war with itself.

On one side is the state Democratic Party organization, which hopes to persuade a federal judge that our primary elections since 1980 have unconstitutionally restricted the party’s “right of association” guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The defendant in the the case is the State of Hawaii, which has been controlled for most of the last five decades by elected officials from that very same Democratic Party. Democrats have thoroughly dominated the legislative, executive, and (largely) the judicial branches of state government, as well as controlling all or most of Hawaii’s Congressional delegation.