IT'S only a few days since the Saturday primary election, and political junkies and pundits are still picking through the election remains, looking for clues and meaning.

That’s a great exercise, one we enjoy as much as the next armchair quarterback. However, in this era of huge government of Guam deficits and looming major budgets cuts, we believe the Legislature should consider a change in Guam’s election laws, to eliminate the closed party primary.

There is no reason why the taxpayers should fund political party elections at all. The value of these every-other-year events is diminishing. Listening to a couple of the television commentators Saturday night, we were reminded that each of the major parties used to field 20 or 30 or more candidates, making the process of winnowing the field down to the top 15 somewhat significant.

This year, though, one party – the Democrats – only put up 15 candidates while the Republicans ran 16. Asking thousands of voters to come out and vote in an election which was, except for one Republican, basically meaningless was a waste of money, manpower and time. Each party could simply select from among its members a 15-candidate roster and submit it to the Election Commission for placement on the general election ballot.

Sure, it’s interesting and fun to try and divine from the election tea leaves what may happen in November when the voters turn out again, hopefully in larger numbers, to vote on the same bunch of folks. We journalists probably enjoy more than most the speculation and interpretation that go with all elections. But the more level-headed among us do admit that spending a bunch of money – the bill for the primary will be well north of a hundred grand – is almost an insult to the hard-working taxpayers who must pay for it.

Even more financially imprudent was the special ballot used for the Public Auditor position, on which several thousand supporters of former Gov. Carl Gutierrez wrote, or stickered, his name. All that did was set up the same race again for Nov. 6. Some way could have been found to move that race beyond the primary, either by allowing a later certification of candidacy for interested candidates or simply conducting the write-in vote in November.

That rather unusual race aside, though, we think the lawmakers should take a good long look at the enabling laws which require a closed party primary in the first place. Political parties are private, non-government entities. At the very least they ought to pay for their own primary election, if one is deemed necessary, and stop telling voters who make a good-faith effort to get to the polls that they cannot cross over and vote for whomever they please.