If we can keep enough people from voting, Hillary can win this thing! Justice Scalia,

not surprisingly, was a big fan of closed primaries. He would, no doubt, find New York pretty close to perfect. No same day registration. No independents voting. Party members only and no switching to the Democratic Party unless you did so by October 9, 2015. Too bad for all those folk who identify with neither party. It's all a form of disenfranchisement, of course, but in an oligarchy one has to expect that sort of thing. Take solace in the fact you independents get to participate in our democracy by paying the taxes that pay for the ballots and the voting machines and the poll workers.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/03/it-s-disenfranchisement-when-independents-can-t-vote-in-primaries.html

It’s Disenfranchisement When Independents Can’t Vote in Primaries
by Linda Killian
04.03.14 12:39 PM ET

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About half the states in the country bar unaffiliated voters from participating in primary elections even though they pay for the process with their tax dollars. Informational election materials, ballots, voting machines, poll workers and ballot tabulation along with most polling places are financed by the public not political parties.

This closed primary system, controlled but not paid for by the Republican and Democratic parties, was upheld by the Supreme Court in a 7-2 vote in 2000 that said open primaries violated the political parties First Amendment rights of free association. In the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia worried that an open primary in which non-party members were allowed to vote “could be enough to destroy the party."

Given the current state of polarization and dysfunction to which the two parties have helped drive our politics, I think a lot of Americans might consider that a good thing. Despite the court’s ruling though, more than half the states still do have open primaries that allow all registered voters to take part and I would argue every state should follow this model.

There are scores of polls showing record dissatisfaction and distrust with government and our two major parties and political system, undoubtedly a significant factor in declining participation rates in elections. Many voters have tuned out a dysfunctional political system they think leaves them out.

Especially Independents and young voters think politics is a rigged game controlled by the two parties and moneyed special interests and largely not worth their attention. The latest polling reveals that more than 50 percent of Millennials under the age of 33 now identify as Independents.

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