Growing up in Tucson, I thought that city elections were supposed to be partisan just like legislative and Congressional elections.  When I moved to Phoenix, I realized that Tucson’s system was unusual.  When I became less naive about politics, I realized that Tucson’s system was designed to designed to disenfranchise Republicans.  When I went to law school, I learned that Tucson’s system is a vestige of the many techniques that allowed the Democrats in the south to disenfranchise black voters.

The Tucsonians who found the system to be fundamentally unfair put several initiatives on the ballot to make Tucson’s system conform to those of the rest of Arizona cities.  Shockingly, the primarily Democratic voters of Tucson were unwilling to repeal the system that has served them so well for the last 90 years.  Last year the State Legislature forced all city elections to be non-partisan.

The hapless Arizona Daily Star responded with a convoluted series of editorials in which it was in favor of the change, but opposed the fact that the change came from the Legislature.  Lacking any background in politics, the Star writers somehow forgot a fundamental tenet of the civil rights movement–those who benefit from a discriminatory system are unlikely to voluntarily change it.

The story took an interesting twist this week because the Obama Justice Department invalidated a move toward non partisan elections in Kinston NC.

Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party.

So the Star originally supported the change that the voters rejected, then objected to the change that the Legislature supported…surely it must support the change that the Justice Department opposes.

We’ll see.