Open primaries *could* ban strategic voting--effectively!
Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 09:15:40 PM PDT
Bear with me, this is a wild fantasy, but a good one:
Suppose the legislation were enacted on the state level mandating that a vote in a primary for candidate in a party other than your own (thus applying to any vote placed by an indie) is permissible only under the condition that it should count also as an automatic advance vote in the general election, should your candidate win his or her primary.
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Con: You forfeit the option of withdrawing this vote between the date of the primary and the general election in order to vote outside your party. This means that if your candidate is proven to be, say, a child molester, or a Lyndon LaRouche supporter in October, you are still suck with him or her in November. Of course, you should consider that you may very well vote for someone in November who could still turn out to be either of these things in December, making this point mostly moot in my eyes.
Pro: This would eliminate any and all possibility of strategic voting in primary elections, thus providing a service to democracy far outweighing the aforementioned negative.
Thoughts? Again, it's fantasy, but I think it's pretty close to flawless.
UPDATE: There's something I'd thought of, but forgot to add in: In conjunction with this, you'd have to apply some sort of restriction to newly-switched voters, or else you'd basically have a glaring loophole. My suggestion is to apply the same second "linked" vote as above to anyone who has changed party affiliation within the last year. If they really believe in what they're doing, it shouldn't matter to them, and it would eliminate virtually all possibility of disingenuous voting.
Caveat: I will respond to just about every comment until you lose interest, and I know it's annoying. It's not because I want the last word, I'm just weird like that. (Maybe this should go at the bottom of all my diaries...)