I took my daughter voting today. Some might think that sounds similar to but not as cool as taking your daughter boating, but I disagree. I think it’s important to instill the value of voting. I’m a firm believer in the idea that if you don’t vote, you have no right to gripe and complain about who’s in office. Recent presidential elections have proven that every vote matters and especially in Minnesota history has proven that third party candidates are viable options.
Of course it’s only the primary in a non-presidential election year, so it’s not worth getting that excited about. But it’s still cool.
I always wonder about primaries. You can only vote for candidates in one political party. Ideally that means Republicans are choosing their candidate, Democrats are choosing their candidate, Independents are choosing their candidate, etc. (that’s all we had on the ballot). That also means you have to pick a party to vote for. You can’t pick a Republican for governor and an Independent for Senate if you wanted. Only one party.
Which makes me wonder what kind of fraud happens in primary elections. Say I’m a Tim Pawlenty supporter (purely hypothetical situation mind you). I’d want my man facing the weakest possible opponent come November. So what’s to stop me from going to the primary election and voting for the weak candidates from a different party? Say I vote for Becky Lourey against Mike Hatch in the DLF primary. Hatch and Pawlenty are front runners, so a poor showing in the primary by Hatch would certainly weaken his position, or, better yet, Hatch could get beaten by Lourey in the primary, leaving Pawlenty as the lone front runner.
What’s to stop that from happening? Maybe it does happen. It seems like the system just assumes voters will be ethical. But I think we can be fairly certain that people in general are not very ethical. Even less so when it comes to politics.
I’m curious why you would call that fraud. There are really two ways to vote. Most obvious is voting for the desired candidate, but there’s also voting against a candidate. There are a lot of people who don’t have a strong preference for a specific person, but take the approach of “anyone but x”. Most often the result is voting for the most likely alternative candidate. Voting in the primary in the same way is just another way of voting against someone you don’t want in office. In your example you don’t want Hatch in office, so you vote against at each stage rather than just the final.
One of the odd things about the American voting system is that each state determines its own rules about voting (within vague boundaries set by the constitution and the federal courts.) So restrictions on primary voting vary by state. In some states, you can only vote in a primary election for the party of which you are a registered member. This (mostly) prevents the sort of thing you are talking about. But it has obvious downsides, too.
I’m glad you took Lexi to vote. It’s been fewer than 100 years since women couldn’t vote!