The interest doesn’t always override concepts like a fair map or making sure everyone can vote here, either. But lately it seems to have gotten more common for it to do so.
The people who administer the elections locally seem OK so far, at least around here. But they’re also not generally the people who get appointed to state level boards.
It also used to be pretty common for people here to vote split tickets, or to change their minds between elections as to which party to vote for. It still happens – but it doesn’t seem to happen publicly as much.
In some states, including New York, you need to be registered in a party in order to vote in the primary elections for that party; and, if you’re not registered in any party, then you don’t get to vote in the primaries, only in the main election. (The primaries choose the party’s candidates for the main election.)
In states that don’t work like that, it occurs to me, I have no idea; and I know some states do have open primaries but also have potential party registration. Maybe somebody from one of those states can enlighten both of us.
I think a couple of states don’t have voters register by party at all. And I’m pretty sure that in any state you can register to vote without choosing a party.
In Montana, you don’t register for a political party when you register to vote. I have an absentee ballot mailed to me for the primary. I actually get two ballots, one for each party. I can vote for candidates from whichever party I choose, but not both parties.
Let’s say I’m a Democrat, and a certain Democratic candidate is guaranteed to win his primary. I could join other Democrats and cross over and vote for the weakest Republican candidate in hopes of increasing the chances of the Democratic candidate winning the General Election. Nobody has ever asked me to do that, but I suppose it’s theoretically possible.
We don’t have primaries here, in the sense that they are considered part of the general electoral process in the USA as I understand it.
Parties have their own candidate selection processes, which are up to them and usually involve a mix of local party membership votes and decisions by state party officials.
Likewise in the UK. If you want a say in choosing a party’s candidates, you join the party, pay the membership fees (and prepare to be bombarded with requests to help with leafleting/canvassing/fundraising and to join party pressure groups, not to mention assorted worthy but tedious meetings).
The Tories did experiment with an “open primary” in one constituency, and a popular local GP was chosen, who went on to win the seat. But she fairly soon proved a bit too independently minded for the leadership, and although she won re-election easily ended up on the losing side of the Brexit debates in the party, and switched to more congenial labels, ultimately losing her seat in Johnson’s 2019 victory.
So I doubt they’ll try that again.
On another tack, it does happen that we have more than one vote on the same day, but I wouldn’t call that a “combined” election - we get separate ballot papers* and separate ballot boxes for each.
*Last time, I had five: London Mayor, London Assembly (constituency and party list), one Borough-wide referendum, one hyper-local referendum.
It’s so you can choose a party’s ballot secretly. You can only actually cast one of the ballots.
There are other states that do something like this without having to shuttle around multiple ballots. In Minnesota, all of the primaries are on one ballot, but you can only vote in one party’s section.
Federal law* requires every state to offer to register people to vote or update their registrations when they interact with the DMV (or whatever a state calls it), unless the state has same-day or no registration. I believe the same thing is required of agencies that handle food stamps and the like.
Federal law* also requires those states to accept a standard form prepared by a federal agency. (Every state also has its own form now, I’m pretty sure, but this is a legacy of a time when mail registration was more contentious.**)
40ish states have online registration.
A small number of states allow registration at the polls.
A growing number of states have automatic registration based on various sources of information (I think always including drivers license/state ID card records, but also sometimes other sources).
Before major elections, there will often be registration drives organized by various groups (partisan and non-partisan) or perhaps by the state. Knocking on addresses that don’t have any registered voters, registration forms in public places, things like that. Perhaps a high school will push 18 year old students to register.
*The federal law technically only applies to elections for congress or presidential electors, but a state would have to create a whole separate voter roll to do this. One or two tried this in the early 1990s when the law was passed, and had special short ballots for DMV-registered voters, but they relented after a few years. It was just too much work.
**See, for instance, what a notable California politician had to say about it:
Ronald Reagan had been making similar arguments for years. “Look at the potential for cheating,” he thundered in 1975 when Democrats proposed a system allowing citizens to register by mail. A voter “can be John Doe in Berkeley, and J. F. Doe in the next county, all by saying he intends to live in both places. . . . Yes, it takes a little work to be a voter; it takes some planning to get to the polls or send an absentee ballot . . . that’s a small price to pay for freedom.”
It varies by state, I think. In California, when we moved years ago, I think we mailed in a form to the local registrar of voters. When my kids became old enuf in recent years, they just registered online. I think they had to enter their address and social security number, and optionally select party preference (Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, etc., or ‘no preference’). If no party selected, at least in CA, then you do not get to vote in one of the parties’ primaries.
True here also; but, for the major parties at least and to some extent for the little ones, in practice it’s boiled down to primaries. It hasn’t always been done that way.
No membership fees here; but yes, you will get fundraising requests, and sometimes requests to help in additional ways.
Over 30 years ago, I went into the county office building. I’m pretty sure that even then there were other options – I think the post office also had the forms, and that you could mail them in.
It gives you the option to vote in whichever primary I want. There are quite a few independent voters so this gives them the chance to vote in the primaries without registering for one of the two major parties.
I see. Here in Illinois there is no party registration requirement. You just specify which ballot you want.
Sending everyone two ballots of which one will be returned sounds strange to me. Print them on the same piece of paper, at least.
They will supplement paper checks over the autumn by physically visiting households where there’s no return, or something suspicious looking, such as (as we have had) more names than the household could reasonably accommodate.
The draft register is open to public inspection, and local political party organisations can get a copy - once upon a time the assumption was that they’d canvass at least the people new to the register, and help spot any shenanigans, but I doubt if there are that many active members nowadays, except perhaps where there’s concentrated targetting in a particular part of the constituency.
The register used to be considered final fir the year in December, but these days, it’s accepted that corrections and new registrations can be made up to much nearer polling day.
A couple of things about Canadian elections: While there were earlier references to “non-partisan” commissions, these are more correctly “non-political” - unlike the US “non-partisan” bodies with split Republican/Democratic membership, these are civil service bodies, and political parties have no representation on them.
Also unlike the US, Canadian citizens 18 and over have a constitutional right to vote. Only 3 people in Canada are not permitted to vote: The Chief Electoral Officer and his Deputy (by law) and the Governor-General (by long-standing convention). For this reason the federal and provincial electoral commissions make every effort to make sure that every voter has the opportunity to vote.
It is true that some of the old big city machines did this, I don’t think it happens now. As others have commented we need to get non-partisan commissions running the elections. The use of voting machines and computers is entirely a result of having far too many elective offices.
So the problem is that 10 people voted with their dead wife’s ballot?
The problem is not that people in say, Wyoming have roughly 10x more representation than someone in Florida? Do you know how many dead spouses you need to make up for that shit?