Here’s your starter for ten in our Saturday slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate:
In many states in the US people register themselves as “Democrat” or “Republican” (with also various options for “Independent” etc.) when they join the electoral register. These lists can then be used by the parties to hold primaries or caucuses to select candidates, letting only registered supporters of the party to take party. Open primaries* where anyone can vote are also held in some places, but if you only want your party’s supporters to vote in a primary then wrapping registering your support into the electoral registration system is a simple and cost-effective way of doing it.
So should a similar system be introduced in the UK?
Possible arguments in favour include:
- 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.
- 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.
- Lists of registered supporters would make it easier for parties to get out their vote and so raise turnout.
- 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.
Agree? Disagree? The comments thread awaits you…
* “Open primaries” in the US means letting registered supporters of other parties take part; in the UK it means letting non-members take part.
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22 Comments
Surely this is the sort of thing for a pilot? Then we could see what happens, rather than a bunch of us guessing?
My voting preferences should never be a matter of public record. Once you open this can of worms you find that public appointments are made mindful of political preferences. You also destroy a major reason for party membership and the funding that goes with it.
In many states in the US people register themselves as
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.
What if you’re Republican when you sign up and change your mind and become Democrat a month later?
What of the fact that in some cultures in this country, there is a tradition of an employer or relative forcing you to vote a certain way? (i.e. you’d be giving incorrect information just to demonstrate to other people you are of a certain political persuasion – which would then be unuseful to political parties.)
Certainly useful for identifying Greens!
Open primaries help to solve representation problems without resort to discriminatory and divisive devices like all-women shortlists, the legality of which the coalition has regrettably extended until 2030. 🙁
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.
Point by point:
That’s not an argument in favour. It’s just the absence of an argument against.
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.
Unless they intend to quit canvassing, this is providing the party with no information it wouldn’t have collected anyway.
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.
Agree with Andrew Suffield. Only recruitment for primaries should be lcoal party membership.
johnr: Agreed that all-women shortlists are an abomination. Do the Lib Dems do it? If so, we should stop immediately.
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…
Absolutely not.
Voting preferences should be private.
I’d consider it a highly illeberal move to ask any representative of government to ask voters about their voting intentions or party affiliation. It’s not the state’s business (while the electoral register surely is).
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.
Is there any evidence that allowing “non-registered supporters” vote in open primaries makes a difference? In the US, there’s been attempts by Rush Limbaugh to interfere with the process, and it only seems to galvanise the real base of your opponents while damaging your own reputation.
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 🙂
Not convinced. At all. For reasons others have already given.
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.
First of all, Tim is absolutely correct: we shouldn’t roll something like this out on a national basis until it has been field tested.
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.
Are the lib dems considering open primaries? Very bad idea
I don’t have any objections to it on principle, as long as it is voluntary. People in the United States seem to be happy with it.
A few comments on the middle ground candidates that result from open primaries. Is this true? In the US the tea party movement – hardly middle ground – is contesting and sometimes winning against establishment candidates.
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.
I’ve always liked this idea, primarily because I think it allows parties to target their own voters, and partly because it allows a better understanding of the electorate. And it may even people to think more in political terms.
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.
As far as the privacy issue is concerned, I imagine that can be solved by allowing people to declare as independents, then you do not know who you are voting for. Surely the only reason for declaring party affiliation is because you can get involved in primaries? Without that, I would imagine about 90% would declare as independent, and then where does that leave you?
So why would we want to do that? Well recently we all got very excited by the election of Barack Obama as president of the USA. It looked as though people were being galvanised by the political process, and what we all want is people getting more involved.
On the other hand this same process gave us George W Bush and Ronald Reagan, and where real influence comes from big money. And the voting turnout in the US is still low, despite everything.
Even so, no reason why we should learn from the US experience and try to work out something better for the UK, where we also have problems with political participation.
No, a bad idea. Primaries too, are a bad idea and have led to all sorts of problems recently.
In the US, where it would seem there have not traditionally been absolutely clear ideological lines between the two main parties (and to an extent with the Tories, who unless I am very ill-informed, do not have a constitution with declared principles in it, unlike Labour or Lib Dems) the idea of open primaries makes some sense. But where as members we sign up to a particular set of principles (irrespective of whether people actually DO it when they join!!) I feel it to be unwise to open voting for candidates to people entirely unsympathetic to those principles. As for a voluntary list of registered supporters, I do feel it could entrench opinion and voting behaviour – if you declare something publicly, you may be less inclined to change your mind?
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?
Given the huge numbers of floating voters in this country – our elections historically are won by floating voters in marginal seats – I don’t see it makes sense.
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?
People in the United States seem to be happy with it.
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.
Open primaries have a big problem in that an opposing party might organise a campaign of their supporters to select the least electable candidate. Boy easily achieved in a purely 2 party system like the US, but much easier here and something we, as the 3rd party would be particularly vulnerable to.
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.