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I'm presuming purple (being red + blue) means a district that could either way?

Lucky you. Here we don't have elections that matter because thanks to redistricting and gerrymandering, the outcome (along party lines) is well established.

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> Here we don't have elections that matter because thanks to redistricting and gerrymandering, the outcome (along party lines) is well established.

All that means is that the general election doesn't matter, and so you need to move your vote to whatever comes before the general election in your district to make it matter.

1. Register for the party that the redistricting and gerrymandering favors.

2. Vote in that party's primaries or participate in their caucuses to support candidates who are closer to center.

Some will object that step #1 is dishonest. I might agree in districts where the district boundaries are actually sensible based on economics and other demographics factors other than party. In districts where one party has redrawn the boundaries to give itself a major structural advantage, they have stolen your vote. Joining their party is simply taking it back. If they do not like that, then they can fix the district boundaries.

I’d like to hear an argument for why #1 might be dishonest. There is no definition of “registered Democrat” except for “someone who is registered as a Democrat.” I’m pretty sure you don’t have to sign anything claiming to believe in certain principles. I’m struggling to think of any way this could be considered dishonest.

Genuine question: is there anything (technically effective) to prevent someone from registering as both a democrat and a republican? And if not, are there any existing how-to guides I could signal-boost?

You can't be registered for multiple parties.

Your voter registration record says which party you're in. The election official would likely make some inquiries if yours said "all of them" on it.

Shouldn’t who you vote for be confidential and you can change your mind till the day? And why can’t a person vote one way for local and another for state ? I don’t get the system

The primaries aren't official US elections. They're unofficial elections set up by each political party (which are private, non-government entities).

You can vote however you want in official elections.

I would be careful about asserting that. In PA there can be referendums on the primary ballots. And the results can be binding (sore loser laws, etc.). They're pretty official looking around here.

The party registration isn't counted as a vote for that party - when you show up on election day you can vote for whoever you want.

What it affects is which parties' primaries you can vote in.

State dependent. In Texas, you don’t register for a party. You just vote in the primary you want (but you can’t vote in both primaries.)

In general, your registered party is part of your state voter registration. Some states use that to determine which primary you can vote in (“closed primary”), while others let you choose a party at the time of voting (“open primary”). Either way, though, voting in both parties’ primaries is operated by the state as part of a unified process, at the same location; so it shouldn’t be possible to vote more than once.

If you’re in a caucus state, that process might be different; I’m not sure.

You 'register' as one, the other, or something different (L, Green, etc.) typically at the DMV or something like it. The selection there is a radio button, not a checkbox.

Of course, nothing prevents you from being a member of whatever party you want, though there are sometimes laws prohibiting when you can change your registration. Oftentimes, you're prohibited from changing your registered party affiliation within a month or so of the primaries.

This definitely differs between countries. Where I'm from, I'm a registered member of all political parties. No rules against it.

Under the old rules, the "dishonest" thing to do is register for the party who's beliefs you least agree with, and then in the primary, vote for the candidate less likely to win in the general, in order for your actual preferred candidate to have a better chance at winning.

That is to say, game the system by looking at the rules and vote for someone you don't actually believe in. (In the primary.) Whether or not that rises to the level of being dishonest is up to you to decide.

(The "new" rules are that the "less likely to win" candidate may be harder to determine in the current political climate.)

Oh noes! The representatives are dealing with dishonest constituents? How ironic.

I did that - then I researched all the candidates and they are trying to one up each other on who is more conservative. The guy trailing behind for government just started a "Deportation Bus" and driving it around for publicity. It's amusingly sad.

You're in my state then. There is the one guy that's.. somewhat centrist, but he's pretty well back in the polling. SO now I'm figuring out what's the lesser of 3 evils that are competitively polling.

We really need Ranked Choice Voting, I really think these polls affect the actual vote tallies at the end of the day.

Couldn't the opposite work as well... choose a candidate so extreme even voters of his own party don't want to support him? Isn't that what happened with Roy Moore and Alabama? The US voting system just seems incredible bad.

In Missouri, Claire McCaskill (Democrate Senator) ran campaign ads during a Republican Primary supporting (in effect) the worst possible republican candidate. This massive spend on campaign advertising by McCaskill during the primary led to this weak Republican winning the nomination, and thus an easy victory for McCaskill during the General Election. A pretty good strategy from McCaskill, but also very underhanded.

Not quite true.

If there is a wave election in November, gerrymandering backfires and ends up losing you more seats than you hope to gain through it. You pack the districts so that you win with 55% to 45%, except for a district here or there which will go 10% to 90%.

In a wave election, it only takes a shift of 5-6% in those gerrymandered districts for them to be lost.

You are pretending that a 'wave election' is a thing that people decide to do, instead of a label applied after the fact as a descriptive aid after the occurrence of the circumstances you describe. In other words, this is circular logic.

In practice, heavily-gerrymandered districts rarely swing parties, and when they do, they almost always swing back.

You are pretending that there aren't circumstances that have an observed relation to systematic deviations from median election results that people can observe to understand that a wave election is more likely to happen in a particular election.

I'm not pretending it: I'm asserting it.

And if it doesn't hold, let there be runtime errors!

As it was written, so shall it be! Go with Root, my son.

You can still have an impact. Make noise in favor of things like open primaries, proportional representation, and instant-runoff/score/range voting.

Imo one of the biggest problems with our current system (single winner FPTP) is it results in two parties, with various side effects such as extremist candidates in primaries, complete lack of representation for minority voters, and gerrymandered districts. Moving towards better systems would help a great deal.

I fully agree with your last point. In fairly exciting news Maine has adopted Ranked Choice Voting as of the last election cycle. It was tested in the courts and survived, so they'll be using RCV for their upcoming elections (both primary and general).

If things go well, that can be an example for the rest of the country. More states should follow the Maine example!

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