On Sunday, November 17, the Oregon Democratic Party central committee rejected a resolution to let independent voters choose the Democratic primary ballot. The vote was 76-55. See this story.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
On Sunday, November 17, the Oregon Democratic Party central committee rejected a resolution to let independent voters choose the Democratic primary ballot. The vote was 76-55. See this story.
Minnesota dont ask for a party ID when you register. Thus, you can decide what major party primary you vote in the minute you walk in the voting booth.
NO primaries.
—
PR and AppV and TOTSOP.
Oregon should have passed Top 2.
Parties should have the right to decide whether to nominate by convention, primary, mail-in or on-line vote. If they chose to nominate by a primary election, they should expect to pay for it, if it is closed.
@WZ,
Parties should not have right to nominate candidates.
Groups of individuals whether organized as parties or an ad hoc basis can provide financial and other support for candidates.
@ JR If we construe a party as a free, private association, it has a perfect free association right to nominate candidates. The nature of the ballot access laws in a particular state determine whether or not the candidates so nominated appear on the official ballot. IMO, the ballot is the expression of a voter’s choice, and every official ballot ought to contain sufficient write-in spaces for a voter to make any vote for any office. In this day and age of downloadable official forms. a voter, or a party, whether or not officially recognized, ought to be able to download official ballots, print in names of candidates that do not appear on the official ballot, distribute such ballots to prospective voters, who may bring, mail, or transmit such ballots to the official voting places.
INDIVIDUAL candidates are nominated/elected
— NOT *parties* – which are factions/fractions of ALL Electors.
@WZ,
A private association has no right to advertize their endorsements on the public ballot.
If a political party would still be free to recruit candidates, help the candidate circulate a petition, provide financial support, etc.
Still clueless ???
Parties = factions of PUBLIC Electors in the CURRENT nomination process.
See the 1989 Eu op.
@ JR
Prior to the official “Australian” type ballots that came in to general use around 1910, each voter originally wrote his or her (mostly his, at that time) choices on a piece of paper, and dropped the paper nallot in a ballot box. Then, parties would print up ballots with the names of their nominees, and distribute them to voters. Voters could either take a preprinted ballot from any party that made then available at the voting place, or simply write their choices on a separate sheet, if they wanted to split their ticket, as they had done previously. It was perfectly natural for a party to “advertise” their endorsements on their own ballots, and the practice simply continued with official, printed ballots.
Walter
not practical today.
Shoot zem… shoot zem all! (Raiders of the Lost Ark)
@WZ,
Early in American history there was a ruling that a printed ballot included machine-printed ballots. This led to political parties printing ballots and distributing them. This was particularly prevalent in the US because of the long ballot. If you wanted to run for city council, you might be expected to pay a “fee” to the machine to be included on their ballot to help pay for printing and “other” expenses.
There were other abuses. Ballot stuffing is where you fold several ballots inside each other and bring them to the polls, pushed them into the ballot box. Or maybe extra ballots found there way into the ballot box through corrupt election workers.
The expression that there is no free lunch comes from the practice of providing a lunch, perhaps a hunk of bread, a hard-boiled egg, and some watered-down beer, along with a printed ballot. You could have given cash, but that would be bribery.
You can beat up the workers of the other parties, and steal their ballots. “His horse must have reared and throwed him off. He’s got a knot on his noggin where he must of hit a rock. I found a few ballots, but the rest of them was blowed all over tarnation. He’s lucky I came across him.”
Or you could mark the ballots with a distinct color such as blue or red so voters could prove they voted the right (or left) way.
When Texas was eliminating party-printed ballots, a party would print a ballot according to government formatting, and include a write-in space for each office. The party would print a specific number for each precinct. A voter could select one of the ballots, and write-in any cross-over votes. By the next election, the government had taken over printing the ballots, which led to party column ballots and straight-ticket voting. In Texas, you would vote for a candidate by striking through his name. You could vote straight ticket by drawing a line down the party column.
That is why we are stuck with party-oriented nominations to this day.
If candidates qualify as individuals then parties are still free to support them. Eliminating the party columns (or party nominations) gets the government out of the business of qualifying parties or running primaries for them.
Official ballots in 1888-1890 to END having tyrant boss gangsters rig nominations
— related to having secret ballots.