Hawaii does not record a party for registered voters.
North Dakota does not “register” voters at all. However, they do keep a list of voters that works pretty much the same as states that have same day registration.
New South Wales
Victoria
Queensland
South Australia
Western Australia
Tasmania
Also Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory
In Canada, the largest size of constituency (other than, say, Mayor of a major city) is the parliamentary riding. Hence, picking a candidate usually means a party meeting for that riding; all the members get together in a hall and vote (sometimes a bit rowdy) on a candidate. In really large ridings (northern and extremely rural) they might have several meetings in several towns). For leader of the party (possible prime minister) they generally rely on conventions with delegates elected at a similar riding meeting. Generally, a riding of around 30,000 voters would rarely have a party membership exceeding 1,000 and often much less, depending on how hotly contested the nomination is.
Contrast this with the USA, where there are a large number of state-wide selections required - governor and sometimes other state officials, senators, presidential candidate selection… To replace the old scene of party bosses making the selection in back rooms with a bit of quid pro quo going on, they eventually switched to state-wide primary elections. Not sure if this is cause or effect, but party membership is much more prevalent in the USA (so many more elective positions to choose?) Somehow or other the states themselves got involved in running he primaries, thus making it logical that the average person would also ask why they could not vote - so now voters can cast ballots in the primaries, no party membership required. The only issue, as others mentioned, is making sure someone does not try to vote in both major parties’ primaries - hence the declaration of “party affiliation” required in many states. Note this seems to have “baked in” the major role of the two main parties.
I’d be curious to hear how and when the parties’ internal primary/selection processes became the business of the state governments instead…
My best guess is that they wanted the state to oversee the election and protect it from irregularities so that the person who got the most votes was nominated.
A terrible decision, because primary voters are not exactly the most objective people when it comes to picking a party’s candidates. Smoke-filled rooms was a much better system in terms of getting decent candidates than the shit show we have now. I don’t understand why people want transparency in the primary - they should want the highest likelihood of their candidate being elected, and an opaque process that produces such a result should be better than a “fair” contest of popularity within the party’s primary voters only.
But it’s hard to underestimate the intelligence of the average American.
The ‘smoke-filled room’ method had its’ failures, too.
Remember President Buchanan? Or Pierce, Harding, Fillmore, or (Andrew) Johnson? None of them anything to boast about. Or the big city political machines, like Tammany in NYC, or Daley in Chicago.
And that process (deliberately) excluded minorities of any gender, race, or sexual orientation, as well as most poor people.
Both methods seem to have problems, just different ones.
Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
Neither does the District of Columbia, for what it’s worth.
So no state requires you to go into a voter registration office and fill out any application before voting. As a citizen, a person can simply enter a voting booth on Election Day and vote. Is that correct?
Being registered with a party, and being a registered voter are two different things.
no, that’s not what he said. he said those states do not require you register with a particular political party in order to vote.
OK. Thank you all for the clarification. Very helpful.
NC allows voters like me to register as unaffiliated , which means I picked no party.
The Dems and GOP allow unaffiliated voters to vote in their NC primaries. That is their decision, it’s not part of state law. In the future they could restrict their primaries to only people in their party. One additional thing is that if you vote in a party primary in NC and there is a runoff you cannot switch to the other party for the runoff. (assuming both parties have a runoff)