The New York State Board of Elections has released a tally of the number of registered voters in each party, as of April 1, 2016. This is the first new tally in New York since the November 1, 2015 tally.
The percentage of voters in each qualified party increased between November 2015 and April 2016, except that the Republican and Conservative shares declined. The number of independent voters also increased.
Democratic: from 49.19% to 49.40%
Republican: from 23.67% to 23.29%
Independence Party: from 4.02% to 4.06%
Conservative: 1.38% to 1.36%
Working Families: .405% to .412%
Green: .220% to .224%
Women’s Equality: only one-hundredth of 1% in both tallies, but raw numbers went from 602 to 1,283
Reform: raw numbers went from 78 to 377.
independents: 21.06% to 21.19%
The Libertarian Party is not ballot-qualified, but the state tracks its registrations. Libertarians had 5,856 registrants in early February and now have 6,017 registrants.
Several times today I have come across comments by Sanders supporters on various news sites that the New York primary was “fixed” for Hillary Clinton because independents are not allowed to vote in the Democratic primary, and that this is part of the conspiracy by the establishment and our corporate overlords.
I’ve worked in New York presidential primaries going back to 1968 and 1972, when there were no presidential candidates listed on the ballot, only the delegate slates in each congressional district that might have been unpledged or pledged to a particular candidate (though you’d know that only if you got one of the palm cards we kept handing out prior to the primary or on primary day when we stood across the street from polling places). The New York primary has always been closed to party members.
I don’t know if Ballot Access News considers closed primaries unfair or part of a conspiracy, but there are good reasons for it, and New York’s closed primary seems to have been around since the state had first primaries.
It’s really tiresome to hear people new to politics thinking that every election law and party rule is part of a conspiracy against their favored candidate.
Or am I wrong? Is it unfair to have closed primaries?
I think closed primaries are just fine as long as the party not the taxpayers pay for it. If a taxpayer is made to pay the costs of the primary but not allowed to vote in it because he or she considers themselves independent rather than a member of a political party, I don’t see how that is fair.
Political parties were forced to nominate by primary, in the 1900’s and 1910’s decades. There were many lawsuits filed by political parties, arguing that they could not be forced to give up nominating by party meeting. The Socialist Party in particular filed many of these lawsuits. The Socialist Party had dues-paying members and wanted the dues-paying members to continue to be the nominators. But all those lawsuits lost.
It is not fair to criticize parties for using taxpayer-funded primaries when the parties didn’t want them. No other country in the world has government-administered primaries for parties to choose nominees.
I agree with C. Bystander. Taxpayers should not be paying for party elections, whether primaries or elections of party precinct committeemen/women.
However, the issue of who pays is akin to rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. There are other much more important, major problems with our method of elections that keep the oligarchs in power. Here are some suggestions:
1. Ballot access requirements for ALL candidates should be exactly the same.
2. Ballots should include only candidate names – no party designations.
3. All state laws that recognize and regulate political parties should be abolished.
Even with the winner being chosen by the suboptimal procedure of single vote for single winner where the winner is the highest vote getter (plurality winner aka first past the post), these three changes would be very significant improvements in how we elect our governmental leaders.
And then of course I can’t make a post like this without say how some sort of preferential voting system would be even more important to providing for an election system that is most acceptable to the most voters, and thus theoretically keeps our democratic republic alive for a few more decades before TJ’s admonition of the need for the tree of liberty to be watered…
However this is all fantasy while the corporate media keeps feeding the D vs. R pablum to a disengaged citizenry which laps up the propaganda without question. Orwell was amazingly prescient.
Washington, Louisiana, and California don’t have state-administered/funded primaries for parties to choose their party nominees.
The founding fathers warned about political parties. Political parties created this system were in prior periods we had straight up elections. Even for the office of President the person receiving the most electoral votes was President and the second largest number of electoral votes was vice President. Feather prior to the civil was we did not have all these restrictions as to who could vote. A person showed up on the designated day and voted. In many cases it took several days for voting to be completed. We went to great pains in Iraq to insure that everyone had the opportunity to vote even people being held in prisons were provided the opportunity to vote. Perhaps we need to reexamine our voting process. For example a polling place should open at 12a.m. and not close until 12a.m. the following morning or when the last registered voter has cast his/her ballot.
Feather there is the question of the purged voter roles and I am not sure of the distinction between active and inactive voters and the effect it has on one’s ability to vote.