When you go down to your city or town hall to vote in the presidential primary March 4, you will have the option of choosing which party's ballot you want. Before you do, I thought you should know your choice goes on your permanent record.
Poll workers mark which ballot you choose _ Democrat, Republican or Liberty Union (those are the only three with presidential primary ballots this year). Not who you voted for - that, of course, is quite private, but which party's primary you chose to take part in. The parties hold onto that information, as one of the few ways they have of compiling information about which voters lean their way.
In November, when you get blitzed with phone calls or mailings from a particular party while hearing virtually nothing from the others, this is how that party decided to target you. Your presidential primary vote put you on a list.
Making my way down State Street in Montpelier today, through the lake-sized puddles generated by this Delaware-like weather we're having, I ran into Secretary of State Deb Markowitz. It had been bugging me why this it is that this presidential primary info is public, so I asked her.
It's the result of a compromise reached some 15 years ago, she said. Vermont doesn't have registration by party, so the political parties wanted some way of ensuring that those who vote in their primaries are committed to them.
That commitment has a tangible payoff for the parties. Because Vermonters do not register to vote by party, as many other states do, it means the political parties in Vermont don't have an easy way of telling who's with them and who isn't. Their counterparts in New York merely have to call up the voter registration files, but here they have to scramble for every indication of which way Joe and Jo Voter lean.
If you donate to a candidate or a cause, they'll know something about your preferences, but otherwise, this bit of information about which ballot you chose in the presidential primary is key to their efforts of building voter profiles that let them target their campaign strategies.
In a sense, Vermont voters are fortunate that we don't have registration by party and a closed primary. Then, you'd be limited to voting in the primary of the party you were registered with. If you were independent-minded and didn't want to register with a party, you wouldn't get to vote in the primary at all.
OK, so our system is better than that, but wouldn't it be even better if the only thing that was recorded was that you voted, without any indication of how you voted?
