Thursday, June 05, 2014

Santa Fe Update

1.  Weld the tail on the donkey.  This would be very exciting, blindfolded.

2.  What if they had an election, and (almost) nobody came?  Fortunately, Angus is on his way, to shore up that voting / participation number. 

3.  How strange.  Why should you be able to vote in a primary, if you are not willing to say that that is your party?  Parties are private organizations, folks.  If they say register, you have to register.  Or else not vote in the primary.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Under that analysis I should not be required to pay for the private parties election costs. The parties should be obligated to pay those costs alone.

I like your analysis.

Anonymous said...

"It is important to vote, especially if you want to change things."

Love to know what one vote is going to change.

Mungowitz said...

Anon 1: Yes, that is right. The parties need to raise money to pay for the primaries. That is correct. If my analysis were accepted, that is.

Dirty Davey said...

Of course, if the party is completely responsible for holding the primary, then the party is also theoretically able to conduct it in a less than fair way--the obvious historical example being the all-white Southern Democratic primaries.

And of course the true cost of primaries varies by the size of the jurisdiction, not the size of the party. Say the NC Libertarians were to get--via petition or vote share in a past election--the same status as the Ds and Rs. Should the state immediately assess the NCLP a one-third share of the cost of conducting the primary election?

To me the key here is that party registration is essentially free and completely malleable. There is no actual cost to saying "put me down as a Democrat this year because I want to vote in their primary". The sole cost is psychological--"I'm horrified by the prospect of having to call myself a 'Democrat'!!" And I'm not willing to grant any significant weight to that psychological cost.

An interesting and somewhat related question is whether California's "top-two" primary system will drive the major parties to institute some sort of pre-primary or convention in order to prevent loss due to vote splitting. (This week's Controller election saw a 45% Republican share of the vote (50% Democratic and 5% Green) but came within a tenth of a percent (2000 votes) of having a two-Republican slate for the general election.)

Thomas W said...

If independents can vote in primaries (based on the linked article's quote of the New Mexico constitution) it seems only logical that all voters can vote in all primaries (since they are all "elections for public officers).

I'd like to see the judge say he's going to rule that Democrats and Republicans can each vote in both primaries and see how fast everybody backtracks.