Democracy Still Needs Fixing

Hundreds of thousands of people wanted to vote in the primaries this year, but were denied by the parties, and we let this happen. We let private clubs determine if someone can vote. Isn’t that absurd?
I’d kinda like to get rid of publicly funded primaries. Why do we spend millions of dollars of public money to run a private club’s organizational internal vote?

Maybe we make a deal, in exchange for public funding of the primary vote, the party has to let anyone vote in their primary (regardless of registration in that or any other party). If the X party want a closed primary, they can run it (and pay for it) themselves. Maybe the Internet Party will have an online primary, that’d be cool, eh?

Furthermore, people should be insulted that they didn’t get to vote in the primary because a Party didn’t want their vote, didn’t want their participation. The parties should be worried that they’re insulting and driving away people. Except that actually they both seem happy to play the game of trying to disenfranchise as many voters as possible (who might possibly vote for the other side).

 I want the answer to be more democracy, not less. We could break the lock held by The Two Parties if we changed ballot access laws and used a rankings or ratings ballot in the general election. A ‘primary’ would be a private function of a party that gets a slot on the ballot because it has some number of registered members. Anyone else can get on the ballot by signature petition. On the ballot you get to rank your choices 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc…; or rate them on a scale of 0..10. Our current focus on primaries is an artifact of needing to get down to two choices on the final ballot, but that’s not necessary with a better ballot where you can express yourself on the whole field (or as much of it as you care to).

Break the two party duopoly. Another rant, because it’s Monday.