On June 21, delegates to the Montana Republican Party state convention endorsed the idea that the party should work to close its primaries. Montana has always had open primaries. See this story. The party also endorsed run-offs for general elections, when no one gets 50% in November. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
How about NO primaries ???
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P.R. and nonpartisan App.V.
The Republicans still want tax payer support. Independents will be paying taxes to support the Republican primary but won’t be able to vote. The Montana governor would probably veto such bills and the Republicans won’t have a veto proof majority, so we may see more of these issues placed on the Montana Ballot like the top two primary.
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UNITY GENERATION!!
The 9th USA Parliament is please to announce the new web site http://www.allpartysystem.com which is a group effort by members of the Green, Libertarian, Democratic, Republican, many other innovative political parties and independents who are aggressively working to unite the American voters of all ages.
Sign up today and become one of our board members who has an equal say with everyone on the team. Make every vote count including your own and don’t stop until you start seeing the benefits of the UNITY GENERATION!
So few candidates run in Montana that they should just dispense with the primaries entirely and go the general election in November with a runoff if necessary.
Runoff’s would still cost money. And if political parties choose poor statewide candidates, you’ll see these runoffs every general election, one because of poor turnout and the other will be more then 3 candidates running.
Runoffs would cost less than a primary.
There were only 228 candidates for 100 House seats (2.28 per race). Very few of those would go to a runoff.
Statewide runoffs would cost the same, since Montana uses mostly one type of ballot scanning machine. Counties and legislative races wouldn’t change either because the election administrators would still have to print out a certain number of ballots based on registration.
There would be only one ballot for the runoff vs. 2 or more for the primaries, and often the ballot would be quite short. Legislative runoffs would be quite unusual. Cost per vote would be much less. Turnout for a gubernatorial or senate or US representative would be as high as for the general election.