Cyclists are liberals?! (Retry)

[VeloVT]

I understand completely your position. In the general election your affiliation is not recorded. I find it very offensive that anyone other than the political party should be able to find my political affiliation. It should not be a public record, available to anyone who wants to inspect the voter registration records. To me, that is an invasion of the privacy of the voting booth.

I guess I should clarify what I said earlier. How this works varies from state to state. In Vermont, you are not asked to declare an affiliation when you register to vote, but you typically are asked to choose a ballot in primary elections (although maybe that is changing, if my experience last week is becoming typical). As noted, your ballot choice is not recorded, but many people still object to having to say it out loud, potentially in front of their neighbors (though I don't object to it greatly myself).

I guess I might object to having to declare my affiliation at registration, if for no other reason than it makes it difficult to make candidate-by-candidate choices (which I don't really do, but I believe in principle that one should be able to do, as long as you vote in only one primary of course).

I think we would be well served to standardize voting procedures and voter registration across the country, taking such concerns into account as well as all of the other important voting issues.

That said, voting is really important and voting in the primary is as important as voting in the general -- the outputs can only be as good as the inputs.