1. Idaho should get rid of all partisan primaries and hold an Open Primary like in Louisiana. If no candidate receives a majority, hold a runoff.

2. @Jim… And like Louisiana become a hyper-partisan hell hole. Much like all states that use top-x.

3. Caucuses > primaries

4. One election, no primary, no problem.

5. I AM SHOCKED – LIKE THE FRENCH COP [CLAUDE R.] IN CASABLANCA MOVIE 1942.

   I CONCUR WITH MAXZIM —

   One election, no primary, no problem.
   —-
   P-A-T

6. I also concur.

7. The trend here is that every blue state will want to hold primaries and every red state will want to hold caucus’s. Political parties should be able to decide how they internally operate. By their choices though, you can clearly demonstrate that Democrats want to represent the big cities while Republicans want to represent the empty plains.

8. The big cities are festering sores of social and biological contagious disease.

9. ONE BIG CITY MACHINATION–

   https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/07/business/food-delivery-minimum-wage-lawsuit-doordash-grubhub/index.html

   MASS STARVATION SHORTLY ???

   VICTORY FOR SUPPLY AND DEMAND. ???

   FOOD BLACK MARKET ???

10. CNN is fake news, and given that the sky has been falling for over 6,000 years, it’s probably going to keep falling long after everyone reading and everyone who remembers them turn to dirt.

11. @Aiden,

    Is Louisiana a hyperpartisan hellhole and Mississippi not?

    Is there correlation to your claim, let alone causality?

12. AIden, much like AZ, is a world renouned expert on everything. The only question remaining in the field of A**ology is what will happen when they inevitably combine into next generation artificial imbecility self replicating engine Alden Z. A**ologists who are of the school that this already occurred believe humanity was soon thereafter terminated and we are currently living in the matrix.

13. “Idaho should get rid of all partisan primaries and hold an Open Primary like in Louisiana”

    Is a party able to opt out of such a primary, and nominate by other means?

14. Yes, if they don’t want to be on the general election ballot.

15. @WZ,

    As you know, “primary” is an adjective meaning “first”. It has become conflated with partisan elections which restrict voters and candidates.

    An open primary in Louisiana is open to all voters and all candidates.

    There are no state-recognized nominations. Political groups are free to endorse candidates.

16. ….But aren’t free to dissociate from candidates they want nothing to do with. They could circulate dissociation flyers, but would have to compete with the state printed bballot.

17. We’ve discussed the whole “groups are free to endorse” and problems with that. Let me see if I can find the thread.

18. Nope. My most recent prior comment on that, so far unanswered:

    I understand the purpose of constitutions. I also think they get some things wrong. As far as methods of voting and access to voting, Max is as he admits extreme, but it sounds a lot better than what we have now and I’d rather see incremental change towards that. Make elections much more local and by party, and get government out of things other than national defense and criminal law enforcement. Standing count in person elections. Precinct level voting access. All those things sound good to me.

    Even if you continue to print or electronically “print” ballots, there is no reason to limit number of parties necessarily. There have been elections in the US and elsewhere with hundreds of choices for the same office. The same population voting in elections, give or take roughly, manages to navigate supermarkets and other such establishments and their digital age equivalents.

    Political organizations can circulate slate cards, but some are much better able to do so than others. Additionally, simply doing that is not enough to attract much attention or candidate/issue identification in the minds of any significant slice of voters. Most voters have jobs, families, and other concerns besides elections and political crap. It takes a lot of repetitive ads in multiple formats to get enough people’s attention. Organizations that are several orders of magnitude below parity with the largest one can’t rise above background noise level, particularly in electorates of millions or even tens or hundreds of millions, covering vast land areas to boot.

    So, let’s not pretend that simply giving easy ballot access gives candidates an even playing field. It just clutters the ballot with a bunch of names few people can associate with anything whatsoever, much less correctly. And that’s if the ballot access is actually easy. I think you either vastly overestimate how many people will take time out of their day to go stand in a courthouse for some candidate, particularly one running for an office few people know the importance of and/or not seen as having much chance to win, or you correctly surmise that this process will actually greatly reduce the available candidate choices, particularly at the lower rungs of power which are the most common stepping stones to higher office later.

    Either way, smaller parties and candidates who are relatively less well known, well funded, and well connected depend on the ballot label much more than the more dominant or establishment ones. With it, they can gradually build issue/candidate identification over multiple cycles. Without it, they don’t get minimal traction to sustain anything, and as a result the choice of ideas – especially ones any significant slice of the electorate is aware of – is reduced, primarily to the already established and predominant ones.

    Contrary to your predictions, there are countries where people vote by party rather than by candidate, or the party listing is given more significance than in the US. Those countries often – I think more often than not – have more parties represented at higher levels of office than the US.

19. Keep in mind, parties or their equivalent will exist whether they are printed on the ballot or not. They’ll adjust the level of difficulty of voting/ballot access to have just the right levels of difficulty in having the establishment backed ones get in easily (for them) and make it difficult for everyone else.

20. BAN apparently precensors its own link, but to see the prior discussion in context it’s under Missouri Green Party Petition Drive, article posted July 5

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