Closed primaries don’t have that problem but it forces people to make a partisan choice, neither a good idea, nor in this country a realistic one (although I’ve pretty much always voted LD, I only just joined and treated each election on its own, , even now I’d be reluctant at registering as LD as I’d somehow feel it’d lock me in even though I know it’s not how it works, so you can imagine for more floating voters, who is the majority here! )

Lastly, primaries are costly. Both in money and time. Both are better spend on the main campaign unless we want to turn into the same moneycracie as the US,and forget altogether the political funding reform.

That’s a terrible argument. By that logic we should have guns, Bible School, and Sarah Palin. The people in the US don’t often know what’s good for them.

Either people would sign up in the early autumn and stick with what they said on the register – and you wouldn’t need to bother with canvassing or leadership debates, because it would all be a done deal. In fact, why bother with an election at all?

Or they’d sign up in the early autumn, change their minds by the following May, and the register would’ve been worthless.

A secret ballot was one of the six main points of Chartism and was hard-earned in this country. Scrapping it to make it easier for political parties to get their vote out seems like a pretty thin reason to over-turn that. We had enough over the last 13 years, surely, of hard-won civil liberties being eroded by government?

It is interesting that Nick Clegg was talking of “an end to tribalism” in his Guardian interview. Does this mean he favours the dropping of the preamble to the Party Constitution?

Although I doubt it will happen because people are so bizarrely unwilling to let their affiliations known. I suspect a lot will opt for ‘independent’ initially.

Also, sensible comment by James above.

I’m not sure you can be the party that advocates limits on executive power and then say, “selecting politicians is something we reserve for the 1% of the electorate that pays for the privilege of doing so. Everyone else can choose from what we’ve decided is good for them”.

Nor was there much evidence of distinctive candidates at the last election, despite the large number of retiring MPs. There may be something to the logistics or some other point that makes primaries unworkable, but saying a system of three parties fighting for the middle ground encourages distinctiveness just doesn’t ring true with me. Certainly the diversity of the Liberal Democrats doesn’t support the case.

One of the parts of the coalition agreement that I hope will be reviewed in the same manner as fixed term parliaments (i.e. refined and strengthened whilst sticking to the underlying principle) is the proposal to hold 200 open primaries around the country. At present it is a rather silly proposal to explore a rather silly idea: the main thing that open primaries will achieve is to ensure that all candidates look to the same base and thus campaign locally on essentially identical agendas. That’s already a problem in UK politics; open primaries will make it considerably worse.

But that isn’t to say that open primaries are always a bad idea (I think we should adopt the system for electing our party leader, for instance), nor is it to say that all primary systems are equally flawed. For this reason I hope that the coalition will eventually come around to the idea of using this pot of money to experiment with a much wider range of systems to encourage voter participation.

Leaving certain practicalities to one side for instance, I think they have great potential in engaging the public. I’m not desperately excited by this idea that we should do nothing to devalue party membership: if the reward is that the party gains access to a much wider potential supporter base, then it might well be a price worth paying.

For me, the crunch issue is about data and privacy: creating an open register of party affiliation is a big step in anybody’s book. Here I think the situation is a bit more nuanced than this thread has thus far reflected.

The secret ballot is a central part of any modern democracy, but there are secret ballots and secret ballots. In many European countries, for example, the act of voter ID is considered quite a shocking attack on the secret ballot; in the US, people register as partisan with none (or certainly very few) of the consequences that some of the more doom-laden critics of registered supporters would have you believe. The UK then is somewhere in-between.

A couple more points:
* No registration system I am aware of forces the voter to declare an affiliation. Indeed, I would think that in the UK a plurality, if not a majority, would choose not to. If we agree that voter ID doesn’t breach the secret ballot because no-one is forced to answer, then we must equally conclude that as register wouldn’t either
* There is however a potential issue about excluding people from significant parts of the political process because they don’t want to register for whatever reason. Should we continue a seperate membership system to ensure that people in this situation can still participate?

In principle, then, I think the idea is worth exploring. In practice however, I think it would be too much of a culture shock and that both the tabloids and certain data privacy campaigners would go nuts over it. It is the wrong time to consider such a move.

Perhaps we should consider a half-way house however: rather than a single register of party affiliation, perhaps the government could simply provide the parties with a bit of free advertising on things like voter registration forms? If the parties used that as a recruiting tool, then it could do more to encourage engagement. After all, they would be required to do a bit more work under that model.

But also, I don’t want open primaries either. Parties should put up candidates who represent their beliefs and then
the voters should pick between them. Otherwise you end up with all the candidates leaning towards a mushy centre instead of being distinctive.

Let the state keep the information it holds on individuals to a minimum, don’t give the parties any reason to be complacent about their level of support, and don’t use the system to encourage individuals to stick with a party out of habit as compared to judging each candidate, each issue, each election on its own merits. Registration strikes me as resisting change rather than embracing it.

Have primaries or caucuses, yes please, but I’d prefer a little more faith in most individuals to not get involved in a party they don’t support. A dash of trouble makers just adds flavour

I also have a suspicion that this sort of system contributes to the dangerous political polarisation in the US, and since that has become so damaging, even a faint suspicion would make me oppose anything that might foster such a destructive state of affairs.

If primaries are to be held in the UK (I think it’s a good idea for constituency candidates), they should be open primaries in any case – no party affilation needed.

If there is any need for registering party affiliation beyond actual party membership perhaps the parties might introduce something like ‘afiliated member status’?
I can see some justification for this if parties themselves want to do this – just as long as the state doesn’t get involved.

Of course, they wouldn’t be needed if we had something sand like STV. Then, you wouldn’t have to have 1 person “representing” a diverse community. One person can hardly be black, white, male, female, gay, and straight…

It would be cheap and easy to add registering as a supporter of a particular party to the electoral registration system as we already have a list of officially registered political parties and are moving to individual registration. So it becomes a matter of recording one extra piece of information.

That’s not an argument in favour. It’s just the absence of an argument against.

Lists of registered supporters could be used by parties to run primaries for any sort of election they wish, opening up candidate selection from often the small number of party members to the wider group of those willing to publicly state they are supporters of the party.

A public declaration of affiliation is a very strange condition to place on a franchise. It encourages corruption (vote buying) while not really giving you anything. Not a good reason for doing it.

Insofar as there is a problem with candidate selection, STV is a much better solution.

Lists of registered supporters would make it easier for parties to get out their vote and so raise turnout.

Unless they intend to quit canvassing, this is providing the party with no information it wouldn’t have collected anyway.

Lists of registered supporters would give parties lists of people they could approach for fundraising, potentially opening up party financial support to a large volume of small supporters rather than the current frequent reliance on small numbers of large donors.

Parties have never been shy about approaching everybody for fundraising.

None of these things seem to be good reasons for doing it, and it encourages vote buying. Looks like a bad idea to me.

However, creating a public database of political supporters (even if voluntary) is something I would need a lot of convincing about. Especially if refusal to declare a political affiliation means you are not eligible to take part in an important part of the democratic process.

And we all know how good the US electoral system is.

This sounds like a bad and unnecessary idea to me. Apart from anything else, I don’t believe it’s a good diea to encourage people to HAVE a longstanding ‘party affiliation’ – that seems to encourage blind support of a party based on its name, without actually scrutinizing its policies. Witness the knuckle-dragging hordes still supporting Labour after these 13 years.

Another reason this is a bad idea is the same principle of why our ballot is secret. Reprisals, maniuplation, and intimidation could be brought to bear if people were affiliated with the ‘wrong’ party. I can certainly see those expressing BNP affiliation struggling to get a job or even being attacked. Not good in a free, liberal country.