Bills have been introduced in both houses of the Tennessee legislature to establish registration by party. They are SB 544 by Senator Bill Ketron (R-Murfreesboro) and HB 629 by Representative Debra Maggart. They would take effect July 1, 2009.
The bills provide that for already-registered voters, the first primary at which such a voter participates it would determine how that voter is registered. If the voter chooses a Democratic ballot, his or her voter registration record would then list that voter as a Democrat. For new voters, the new voter registration form would include a blank line asking for that voter’s party. Here is the text of the bill.
The bill authors seem uninformed about case law concerning voter registration by party. The bills assert that no one may vote in a primary without having joined a party. But in Tashjian v Republican Party of Connecticut, the question of whether independent voters may vote in a partisan primary is a decision for the political party, not the state. Also the bills do not deal with registration into a party that is not a qualified party. Courts in Colorado, Oklahoma, New Jersey, New York, and Iowa have ruled that voters must be allowed to register into unqualified parties.
Debra Maggart is a Republican from Hendersonville.
In Tashjian, the U. S. Supreme Court gave parties the right to invite independents into their primaries.
Arizona, to my knowledge, is the only state that requires parties to let independents vote in their primaries. In 2007, the Libertarians won a federal court ruling exempting them from this law, but the Democrats and Republicans are still meekly following it.
Because of an attorney general’s opinion, Nebraska independents are allowed to vote in party primaries for Congress. The reasoning behind this is that independents are eligible to vote in the “nonpartisan primary” for the state legislature.
The open-primary states, of course, mandate that parties let all voters– including independents– participate in their primaries. Iowa is the only such state that has party registration.
MN is a open primary State. I do not feel that we get too many people from another party (A) deciding to vote in a party priamry (B) that they do not really support.
All major parties in the State — DFL, GOP and IND — go through the primary process. In the past the Greens and CP were also major parties. For major parties ballot access is pretty simple.
Everyone else nominates via a petitioning process that can be a bit of a pain. Mainly because you only get 2 weeks to circulate the petition.
For party registration States; how do you include non-qualified parties? Leave a blank space?
It would simply make a public record of registration.
The code that the legislation would replace (2-7-115(b)) currently reads as:
(b) A registered voter is entitled to vote in a primary election for offices for which the voter is qualified to vote at the polling place where the voter is registered if:
(1) The voter is a bona fide member of and affiliated with the political party in whose primary the voter seeks to vote; or
(2) At the time the voter seeks to vote, the voter declares allegiance to the political party in whose primary the voter seeks to vote and states that the voter intends to affiliate with that party.
I suppose one or the other of the Tennessee political parties could’ve sued to allow non-bona fide members to participate based on Tashjian.
#2 The US Constitution requires that the qualification for voting in elections for the larger house of the state legislature and Congress be the same. It is only because of the addle-headed decisions by Hugo Black (Oregon v. Mitchell) and Thurgood Marshall (Tashjian) that this simple principle is not understood.
#6: It’s been a few years since I read Tashjian, but as I recall, that was the main thrust of John Paul Stevens’s dissent. Scalia concurred with Stevens in part and also wrote his own separate dissent. It was a 5-4 ruling.
I agree that parties should have the right to invite independents into their primaries. But the state has no business forcing parties to let independents vote in their primaries, as Arizona does (the open primary states, of course, force parties to let independents as well as opposing party members vote in their primaries).
I disagree with Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion in Clingman v. Beaver (2005), which said that the state may prohibit parties from inviting members of opposing parties to vote in their primaries. Thomas was highly critical of Tashjian and came close to striking it down.
Independent voters are united States citizens registered to vote. When the nation started, all voters were independent voters. There were no organized political parties in the United States until the election of 1800 when a party started by Thomas Jefferson took over the government, resulting in the two-party corruption that controls the nation today.
Once political parties established control over government offices, they were quick to pass laws designed to prevent independent voters from being elected to public office, a process which continues to this day.
The weakness of political parties is that they are what George Washington referred to as “artificial authority” in government, an improper representation of the people, whereas, independent voters were created by the writing of the Constitution of the United States.
Robert B. Winn
As Justice Antonin Scalia has said, the founding of political parties was concomitant with the founding of the nation. He also wrote, “Representative democracy… is unimaginable without the ability of citizens to band together in promoting among the electorate candidates who espouse their political beliefs.”
Iraq, about the size of California, has some 75 political parties. Even in countries where parties are outlawed, people join together in parties.
I can’t get the link to your website to work, Mr. Winn.