This is what voter Fraud, and Intimidation look like

[pecunium]

A man arrested for voter fraud in Ontario Calif.

A crowd intimidating voters in N. Carolina.

Take a guess about which side was doing those. Good luck finding comparable examples from the other side of the aisle.

(p.s. the Michigan GOP admits to illegally trying to suppress voters)

Comments

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The issue is really simple. If you aren't registered, you can't vote.

To case a primary vote (which is a partisan election) one must be a registered member of the party.

People tend (about 80 percent of the time) to vote for the candidate of the party to which they belong, when the actual election takes place.

Which means finding a way to get 10 of them off the rolls = -8 votes to the opposition, and -2 votes to your candidate. Which is a net win.

[calcinations.livejournal.com]

It's this registering for a party thing that I find weird, as a briton.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

It's independant of whom you vote for. It's a way to have an individual say in the selection process the party engages in when choosing which people will stand for office, representing the party.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Registering for a party in the US is so that you may vote in its primary: that is, to decide on its candidate for the general election. The British equivalent of this is joining a party and going to the constituency candidate selection meetings, except that for the US primaries there's no party membership fee.

Or another point:

Who decides who will be the Labour or Conservative or Lib Dem party leader and thus the candidate for Prime Minister? Well, it used to be the M.P.s, and the voters were stuck with the choice. Now they hold a ballot and the party members get to vote. That's rather like a U.S. presidential primary.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

But that's the difference. If I join the BNP (UK), I might get to vote between the Mosley / Whiplash candidates. I join that party, I get to go to that party's conferences, I get to vote on internal party stuff. I don't need to go anywhere a _government_ or even a civil service "registration" process that then influences some supposedly independent party's choices.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

What's the difference in this difference? The government is just keeping the lists and managing the party primaries; it doesn't interfere with them. (There are a lot more gruesome stories of British local parties manipulating procedural rules to force in preferred candidates than there are in the U.S., precisely because we use straightforward primary elections in the U.S.) Anyone can join any party in the U.S., just as in the U.K., and they don't have to pay to maintain memberships.

As far as I know, people active in actually managing the parties, or running for office, are expected to maintain party membership, but that's also as far as I know true in both countries.