he vacuous exercise that passed for primary elections on Tuesday should be the last of its kind, assuming the Clean Elections system that includes substantial public financing goes into effect in 2002 as planned.
If so, it will be a fitting epitaph for an electoral system that is clearly moribund. With 200 legislative seats at stake, the two major parties could have mounted as many as 400 primary contests. Instead, there were 32.
The result was entirely predictable: the lowest voter turnout in history. Secretary of State William F. Galvin estimated late yesterday that the final figure would come in as low as 8 percent. What a disgrace.
Standard definitions of ''election'' use the word choice. To elect is to choose one article over another. Where there is no choice there is no election. So Tuesday's voting, in dozens of communities where there was no contest for any office, was an outright fraud.
Blame can be spread around. Republicans accounted for only four of the 32 legislative contests. And, the GOP is not even fielding a candidate in November in a majority of the Senate districts or in scores of House districts. This is an indictment of Governor Paul Cellucci and GOP leaders who have failed to build the Republican Party despite holding the governor's office for a decade. But the Democrats can't claim to have performed much better, with so few contests, and many of them for open seats.
The situation could hardly get worse. Democracy itself is threatened.
The Clean Elections system approved by voters in 1998 cannot guarantee a revitalization of electoral activity in 2002, but there is solid reason to hope that it will.
For one thing, elections cost money, and the intimidating power of incumbents to finance reelection campaigns now scares off most potential challengers. Clean Elections will offer challengers enough funds to run competitive races.
In Maine and Arizona, where systems including public financing are taking effect in legislative races this year, increased activity is due partly to the implementation of term limits, an overly blunt instrument. Still, the change is enormous. Only eight of the 30 Arizona Senate seats were contested in 1998; this year, 22 have contests. And in Maine, several viable candidates say they could never have raised the funds to run under the old system.
The Massachusetts Legislature, while appropriating funds for Clean Elections, has tried several times to cripple the Clean Elections system. This is completely understandable: Why would incumbents want challengers? But it is also completely undemocratic. The voters adopted Clean Elections. They have a right to give it a fair trial.
Democracy may yet blossom out of Tuesday's graveyard.
