I’m sorry you disagree with that. I personally think it’s none of the state’s fucking business what nongovernmental organizations I have an affinity for or with.
I’m glad you’ve clarified that, even though we disagree. (Not that it matters now, but I really don’t see a hint of it in your previous posts in this thread.)
This may be true in your state, but not in mine. The voter registration form in New Hampshire does indeed have a place to declare your party affiliation (or Independent), and we do have an open primary.
Indeed. When I go to vote in a primary they hand me a republican ballot, but I’m fairly sure I could ask for a democrat one instead were I inclined to vote that way instead.
That was my experience also. They just asked which ballot I wanted.
Well, I should have been more explicit about the fact that, in an open primary state where you do have to establish an affiliation at registration, the thing they won’t have is a record of which ballot you took, usually. I intended the full force of my statement to apply to states without declaration of affiliation.
I notice you didn’t address my other comments. 
I never contested that.
Florida has closed primaries and I have never heard this argument. Since all parties equally have closed primaries and the individual voters can participate in their OWN primary, I don’t see how taxpayers are getting screwed.
It’s a novel argument indeed that since the government has decided to provide a service that I choose not to participate in, that I somehow shouldn’t have to pay. Since I never go to the park, should the city/county reimburse me a portion of my taxes?
Does your state pay to run elections for officers of corporations? or private clubs? The point is that DNC and RNC are private organizations that want to control all of the aspects what is basically their own private election yet make the taxpayers pay for it.
That is very much different. Surely you agree that the state should control the general election in November?
So, instead of having 100 candidates on the ballot, it seems reasonable that the major parties should be allowed to narrow the candidates to make the election manageable. And as such they should allow participation only to members of those parties.
That’s a far cry from having the state pay for the elections to my Home Owners Association. That is the FINAL election and only affects the people who live there, and one would torture the definition of “reasonable” to make it a state concern…
I assume that you’re aware that even in places with a closed primary there is no way to stop a hardcore right-winger from registering as a Democrat, simply for the purpose of trying to put the most conservative opponent on the ticket. So, even with closed primaries, you really aren’t limiting the decision to those who would choose to meddle in the internal affairs of a political party.
Hell, there are even members of this board who get the :rolleyes: treatment every time they claim to be registered members of this or that party.
That suits me fine. You have to draw the line somewhere, and that’s where I think it should be. You can vote in my primary, but you have to declare. It won’t keep all the riff-raff out, but half a loaf is better than none.
Yes, but it greatly cuts down on those scofflaws. In a closed primary system, I would have to make a trip to the courthouse, in most cases more than 30 days prior to the election and change my voter registration. Not many people will do that; in fact near zero.
In an open primary, I can gauge the circumstances up to the very second that I walk into the voting precient and decide on the spot that I want a DEM, no GOP, no DEM, WAIT! GOP…sorry, DEM. Ok, GOP, and that is final. Wait, DEM ballot! Final answer, Regis.
But, we keep moving away from what the primaries are supposed to do. In a rare view of frugality with government spending, Dopers are worrying about the state budget. Would anyone disagree that the basic idea of a primary is for Republicans to decide on their candidates, while the Dems decide on THEIR candidate (and yes all of the other parties)
So what is the point of saying, “We Democrats choose Obama!” when in fact only 30% of the voters were DEMS, while 40% were independents, and 30% were Republicans.
Just like my analogy of having a meeting of Dopers and seeing what we agree upon, but we let everyone else in the world have a say in what we want. What’s the point?
I’m not talking about changing their affiliation, I’m talking about people who permanently affiliate themselves with a party that they’re not likely to ever vote for for federal office. They likely figure that they’ll be happy with whatever person who shares their ideology gets the nom, so they want to influence the competition of said person. These people exist, and while I’m aware of many of them individually, as a whole, their numbers are unknown.
They’re not exactly doing lie-detection testing upon registration.
Edit: typo
Sorry, I have more time to respond now -
just to provide background, my entire voting history is in a state that was only very recently dragged kicking and screaming into having an open primary. A closed primary is so far out of my experience, that I might be overlooking the good parts. And I admit, it might just be a purely emotional reaction.
I don’t think it’s any of the state’s business which party I vote for.
From what I’ve seen, (and please correct me if I’m wrong) when you have to register by party, it becomes part of the public record, and anyone can find out - I don’t think it’s anyone else’s business which party I vote for.
In primary “elections” where there is only one candidate, in a closed primary, the state (and anyone else) knows who I did vote for. That feels like it throws away the entire idea of a secret ballot. To me, that’s not in the spirit of a free or fair election.
I think having to request one particular ballot or another might surpress voters who live in an area where they aren’t in the majority.
I really don’t like the idea of paying for a private club’s elections - it bothers me that the parties are trying to have it both ways “we’re too private to let anyone participate, but too public to pay for it.” If you’re private, be private. If you’re public, be public.
Since a sizeable percentage of people are moderate and/or independent, I think that closing a primary eliminates their voice in elections. Especially at levels of voting where the election really is decided at the primary level.
I think that closing primaries give the two major parties way too much power in shaping the final outcomes in elections. And I have no idea how responsive or representative or accountable “the party” may or may not be to its members, much less the entirety of the electorate. I don’t trust them.
Even though it isn’t an election, the non-presidential primaries are often are mixed in with significant non-partisan primaries, ballot measures, other real honest-to-goodness elections, which makes them look like real elections and gives them the feel and gravity of an actual election. I find it disingenuous to hear “no, no, this part - just a nominating process. It’s different than everything else you’re voting for at the same time, using the same means.”
And finally, closed primaries make me shudder.
States generally have some other process for keeping the number of names on the ballot down to a semi-reasonable number, such as requiring a certain number of signatures on petitions in order to qualify for the ballot if you, or your party, hasn’t gotten a certain percentage of the vote in recent elections.
The purpose of parties isn’t to cut down on the number of general election candidates on the ballot, but to confer a greater degree of legitimacy on some of the candidates on that ballot.
It confers greater legitimacy on the candidates because it’s an endorsement. It’s the Democrats, or the Republicans, or the Green Party, or the Right to Life Party or whoever saying, “Our organization thinks that this person is the best candidate for office.” If the nominating process for a party is open to anybody, whether or not they’re a member of the party, though, that endorsement becomes meaningless.
If only states gave the parties that option! But (with rare exceptions) they don’t, and never have. In Illinois, and in most other states, if you are a “major party” (defined by vote received in previous election) and want to get your nominee onto the ballot for governor or senator or state treasurer in the fall, you have no choice but to choose your candidate in a state-run primary under state-dictated rules. The only alternative is to restart your party from the ground up and petition to get on the ballot under a new name each election cycle, which would deter the most determined partisan that ever lived.
Actually, they can’t, because the Supreme Court has determined that some rules violate the parties’ constitutional right of free association (a concomitant of freedom of speech). In Tashjian v. Republican Party of Connecticut, SCOTUS barred Connecticut from mandating a closed primary against the wishes of its state Republican Party. In California Democratic Party v. Jones, SCOTUS barred California from mandating a blanket primary (an extreme form of open primary) against the wishes of its state Democratic Party. In Miller v. Brown, an appellate court ruled that Virginia’s attempt to mandate a more generic open primary, against the wishes of its state Republican Party, was unconstitutional.
My hope is that states will get out of the primary business as they find that they are increasingly constrained in setting the rules. State-run primaries are an abomination, the bastard child of Progressive do-gooders and Southern racists (who wanted a way to confine elections within the Democratic Party) from the turn of the Twentieth Century. They should be abolished.
The state’s only interest in partisan nominating processes should be verification of gets onto the general election ballot. This can be done less intrusively, as it is in every other country in the world.
How can they deny it to them?
Maybe that made sense to the SCOTUS, but it makes none to me. The parties have a Constitutional right of free association that is, IMHO, adequately expressed by their choice of whether to participate in a state-run primary.
To my knowledge, no state party has ever raised the broader challenge that it shouldn’t be required to nominate by primary at all.
We’ve had one instance of the reverse, in *American Party of Texas v. White*, in which a Texas “minor party” complained that they wanted the state to conduct a primary on their behalf but state law forbade it. In that case, the Court found, “The Equal Protection Clause does not forbid the requirement that small parties proceed by convention, rather than primary election. The convention process has not been shown here to be invidiously more burdensome than the primary election, followed by a runoff election where necessary.” In other words, the state doesn’t have to hold a primary for you if it doesn’t want to. But what about the reverse case, if a party doesn’t want the state to hold a primary? Again, I know of no such case.
Of course it hasn’t, because the state has never had the power to require that.
If a party wants to choose its delegates by convention or caucus, it’s free to do so: there’s no way a state can dictate to a party the means of its delegate selection.
If the state absolutely insists on distributing a primary ballot for that party anyway, it would be called a ‘beauty contest’ primary, meaning that the primary’s for show, rather than for real. That kind of primary used to be not uncommon back in the 1960s and early 1970s.
But that wasn’t the issue I was raising, which was that there’s no way to deny a party the option of running, and paying for, their own primary. I mean, how would you stop them - forbid them from renting locations where people could vote? Turn firehoses on their poll workers? I’m missing something here.