By Linda Killian
District of Columbia voters went to the polls Tuesday, a few of them anyway, to vote in mayoral and city council primary elections. Unfortunately, although I am a Washington resident, I was not one of them. My non-participation wasn’t due to a lack of interest but because I am an Independent voter.
The DC Board of Elections officially lists my party affiliation as “No Party.” It’s a non-affiliation I claim proudly but it comes with a price. Like many millions of other unaffiliated voters around the country I am prevented from exercising the right to vote in partisan primary elections.
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Independent voters all over the country face the same dilemma. Increasingly with gerrymandered congressional and state legislative districts and this nation’s geographic sorting of people living near those who think and vote just like them, the general election is essentially meaningless and the primary vote is the deciding election in many places.
When I was interviewing hundreds of voters for my book “The Swing Vote” one of the things I heard most often from Independent voters, who are now a larger group than either Democrats or Republicans, was their dissatisfaction with the candidate choices they were given. So many of them told me they feel they are always choosing between the lesser of two evils and voting against, rather than for someone.
About half the states in the country bar unaffiliated voters from participating in primary elections even though they pay for the process with their tax dollars. Informational election materials, ballots, voting machines, poll workers and ballot tabulation along with most polling places are financed by the public not political parties.
Read the full article here.
That’s a unique system, as far as I know, and should be changed.
I would add that many minor parties ( at least in Ohio) wouldn’t need a primary, IF they could find another way to have those invaluable data base of member names! In Ohio the only way to get registered is via a Primary, so yes there is a LP Primary so we have the database of names. Those names are important when petitioning in Ohio. Wish we had motor-voter law to allow party registration at the BMV.
Furthermore, it would be great in Ohio if ballot access RETENTION had another trigger: set a threshold of people that registered with a party to maintain ballot access. Wow, its’ done in other states, but not Ohio.
They can charge whatever fees they want, and candidates can run as independents or create their own parties that nominate by convention and charge lower fees. I have no problem with that.
Some southern states required parties to pay for their own primaries as recently as the 1970’s and even 1980’s, and South Carolina made parties pay for their own presidential primary as recently as 2012. But when that happens, the parties simply charge huge filing fees, because otherwise they can’t afford the costs of administration.
Top two and other such dangerous schemes are the wrong solution to this real problem of publicly financed private primaries.
I agree.
I agree with the second part as well, but I don’t think taxpayers should ever be charged for party primaries. Ever.
Exactly. Parties should have every right to exclude anyone they want from their primaries; if they pay for them themselves. If taxpayers are footing the bill, then all taxpayers have a right to vote in the primary, regardless of party registration.
Parties should nominate their candidates any way they want to – convention or primary, open on closed – and pay for it themselves rather than charging the taxvictims.
“Like many millions of other unaffiliated voters around the country I am prevented from exercising the right to vote in partisan primary elections.”
This is the same kind of socialist egalitarian ideology that prompted Wagner & Co. to ‘illegally” abrogate the bylaws of the L.P.O. If Ms Killian desired to vote for one of the major party candidates, it would be a small matter to simply change her registration to either D or R or in the case of “third parties”, to join on of those parties and attend their nominating conventions.
A political party is a LEGAL ENTITY with all the same rights as a non-profit corporation. It is simple common sense the “partisans” of ANY party have a legal right to exclude non-partisan
from participating in their “internal” affairs.
The right of association is as fundamental as any of our civil liberties.