Talk:Open primary
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[edit] Louisiana vs. other "open primary" states
I'm not fully qualified to do this, but here is my understanding. In Lousisana (and maybe Alaska, I'm less familar with this) one files to run for an office. While his or her party affilation is known, one is not the nominee of any party and all voters may vote in the primary for all offices, and can if they choose to vote for the members of one party for some offices and other for others. What this "open primary" is makes it considerably different than that it most other states, where a primary is "open" in the sense that one's voter registration doesn't reflect membership in a particular party, but on the day of the primary election one must declare which primary he or she chooses to participate in, and is then restricted to choices among those running for the nomination of that party for all offices on the ballot that day.
The Louisiana system is probably more comparable to the general election system used in many countries in which it is presumed that no one candidate or party will receive a majority in a first round of voting and that there will be necessarily a second round, often referred to as a "runoff" in the United States. In fact, the Louisiana system is essentialy this, in that if a candidate receives a clear majority (50% + one) in the "primary", he or she is deemed to have been elected with no further campaigning required, making the voting somewhat less than in the nature of a true primary and more that of a general election. There could even be some note in the article that it is widely felt that the Louisiana system was enacted by a Democratic legislature in an attempt to prevent the state from largely changing hands to Republican control; if this were the intent, it has been a success to a considerable degree.
The article should also note that when a similar sort of scheme was enacted in California, allowing people to vote in primaries for candidates of both parties, it was voided by the U.S. Supreme Court (California Democratic Party v. Jones) as allowing preventing the parties from having their nominees being chosen by their own legitimate members and allowing their nomination processes to be opened to potential "sabotage" by those whose sole interest was in a party being forced to support only weak, unelectable nominees who could then be defeated easily by the other party's slate in the general election. (Of course, this charge is often made in all "open primary" states where one can change party affiliation at every primary and can occur when one party's primary is generally uneventful and there are consensus nominees widely expected to win; many of its members may then vote in the other party's primary, either in an attempt to sabotage it or in a sincere attempt to help ensure that each party has the best-possible nominees, with "best" perhaps being a different standard than that which would be applied by "real" members of the party whose primary is being "invaded".)
Rlquall 16:33, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Open primary in Tennessee
The item about not being required to state a party preference publically is not true about Tennessee. One must declare the primary in which one desires to vote at each primary election and this declaration becomes part of the permanent public record; however one does not register as a member of a party and can change more or less freely at each primary election and many do this, but this change is public. This system is often used to confuse voters with regards to the records of a primary opponent. For example, county offices in Nashville are almost almost always decided in the Democratic primary; often there is not even a Republican primary or only a token one with only one or two candidates even if several offices are being contested, so that it is meaningless and the Democratic primary is the only "real" election for these offices. For Republicans and Independents not to be disenfranchised in the voting process, they often "join" the Democratic Party for the purpose of voting in these elections; Republicans then generally "rejoin" their party when they have statewide offices to make nominations for (governor and senator). This fact was used against current Republican senatorial nominee Bob Corker in the primary; they noted that he wasn't a "real Republican" because he had voted in the Democratic primary while briefly a resident of Nashville years ago, his response being that he had to do so to be able to cast a meaningful vote for the offices being contested. Rlquall 17:20, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
- Missouri is exactly the same as TN (at least as of 2004; both parties only had token opposition in the primaries in the races I cared about this year), in which to get the ballots were color coded by the party you declared you wanted to vote in (with another color for not voting in any party primary and merely in the local general election and/or state wide balot issues). This seems to be a matter of public record here as well because I got a lot of Republican state campaign material but no Democratic state campaign material for the general elections in 2004 and 06. (In fact the only material I got from a Democrat was from our State Representive who has gotten a lot of cross party support in the past two elections.) Jon 17:41, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
