On September 20, the Michigan House Redistricting and Elections Committee passed SB 584. It keeps the Michigan presidential primary on February 28, but provides that voters must request one particular party’s primary ballot. The list of which voters choose which party’s primary ballot is then a public record. UPDATE: on the afternoon of September 20, the bill passed the Senate, and is on its way to the Governor.
Past presidential primaries in Michigan, in most years, have been secret open primaries, in which the voter decides in the secrecy of the voting booth which party’s presidential primary to vote in. However, even then, the voter had to confine voting to only one party’s primary ballot. Thanks to Frontloading HQ for this news.
This seems like quite a loss of privacy for the voter. Who gains from this law, and what do they gain? Could this be another Repub move to DISCOURAGE voting by potential Dems? Moderate minded folks might forego voting to preserve privacy, while highly motivated Tea Party types would charge ahead.
William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
Internetvoting@gmail.com
Twitter: wjkno1
I was hoping you would make a similar comment in the blog post from last night, that says the California Court of Appeals told the Secretary of State not to put write-in space on November ballots for congress and state office, even though the election law continues to say there should be write-in space, and continues to say that any voter can cast a write-in vote for any office “in any election.” What do you think about that? I hope you agree that is also a loss for voters.
#1 It is a requirement of the national Democratic party that delegates be chosen by “members” of the Democratic Party. There are enough pragmatists who realize that they could never convert the party into a membership body, or even get States to switch to party registration.
But the control-freak wing is able to say can’t we at least force those States where voters choose a party on the ballot to play by our rules. Many of these States simply don’t hold presidential primaries, or in other cases the State party ignores the results of the primary. The activists in the State party may or may not care that much – since they are used to the sort of primary, though they do like having a list of party members for get out the vote drives. The Republicans generally are more laissez-faire about how delegate selection is done.
In robot party hack regimes the party hack robots can have a PRIVATE primary.
Gee what is the New Age cost to produce a PRIVATE ballot, mail it out, mail it back and have it counted ???
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until — P.R. and App.V. — NO primaries.
As I noted in a comment on Richard’s earlier report on this bill, SB584 appears to me to be at least partly aimed at overturning _Green Party of Michigan v Land_, which invalidated the Big Two’s previous attempt to gain party-affiliation information from Presidential primary ballots. Then, they wanted to keep the information for themselves; this time, apparently, they’ll let consultants pay for the data too — and presume that the smaller parties won’t have the funds to buy it.
Super primary! Have each major party nominate, say, 3 candidates for the general election ballot. Third parties would usually nominate 1 each (maybe 2 if they have more than 1 high-profiled candidate in the running).
#5 The bill says the lists will be made available to the public in an electronic form.
Soooo — Michigan becomes one more State with robot party hack PURGE lists.
See the Stalin and Hitler purges in the 1930s.