Senate Majority Leader Matthew Rosendale and House Majority Leader Keith Regier testified last year that a closed-primary system would help conservative Republicans keep party moderates out of the Legislature.

Attorneys for the state have argued that the Republican plaintiffs have failed to provide evidence of their claims of crossover voting and the century-old primary system should not be changed based on the party's assumptions that it happens.

Only in very rare circumstances has an election's outcome been changed by voters aligned with another party deliberately trying to affect it, Secretary of State Linda McCulloch said.

"I think it's a myth," McCulloch, a Democrat, said of crossover voting. "I think it's really a matter of independent voters sometimes voting Republican, sometimes for Democrats."

Changing the system so close to the elections would have been problematic, she added. It would require many months to properly contact all 635,000 voters in the state about the change, she said.

U.S. District Judge Brian Morris initially ruled against the Republicans in December, saying they have too many unproven claims about crossover voting to issue an injunction but allowed the case to proceed to trial. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was next to reject the request for an injunction, saying the Republican plaintiffs had not shown their case is likely to succeed or that they would be irreparably harmed if the primaries remained open.

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