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The Michigan Messenger going forward

By Staff Report | 11.16.11

I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]

Colorado-based abstinence program provided false and misleading information to Michigan students

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By Todd A. Heywood | 11.16.11

An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.

Class action lawsuit filed against MERS over unpaid taxes

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By Todd A. Heywood | 11.15.11

Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.

Schuette fights important mercury regulations

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By Eartha Jane Melzer | 11.14.11

Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.

Protect the secret ballot

By Ed Brayton | 03.15.10 | 7:20 am

The Detroit Free Press has an article about the court ruling last week that gave Mark Grebner — and everyone else — access to data on which party’s primary Michigan voters voted in during the 2008 election. They begin that article with a false dichotomy:

It took two years, a lawsuit and a Court of Appeals verdict, but supporters of open government scored a victory last week when the Secretary of State was ordered to open voting records from Michigan’s 2008 presidential primary.

Some voters may take offense when the records reveal which party’s primary they participated in, but the alternative was that the two parties would have information no one else could access.

No, that was one alternative. The other alternative is for the legislature to protect all such voting records from everyone, including the two major political parties and Mark Grebner and anyone else.

When you go to vote, they give you the ballot inside a sleeve that protects your vote from the view of others. When you step into the voting booth, there are typically curtains to draw around you — again, to protect the privacy of your vote from the view of others. So why, then, does the government simply release such information, even partially, to private organizations without your permission?

For that matter, why does the government run the primary elections — only for the two major parties? The Republican and Democratic parties are private organizations. Who they nominate to put on the general election ballot and how they pick those candidates has nothing at all to do with the state.

The state doesn’t run the nominating conventions for the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, the Constitution Party or any other political party. Yet we spend millions and millions of taxpayer dollars to have the state run the nomination votes for the two major parties, just one of the innumerable ways the government privileges those two parties against any rivals.

It’s time to get the government out of this business altogether. They should run the general elections, not the nominating process for any political party. And they should keep the ballots cast by voters entirely private and protected from the eyes of those who profit from having them.

Comments

  • MarkGrebner

    It's a funny thing, but if government gets out of the primary election business, we'll be exactly where we started – 100 years ago. Until that time, each party operated as sort of a private club, selecting and putting forth candidates by whatever process it chose. The term “smoke filled room” was coined to describe it.

    Along came the Progressives, starting in Wisconsin, who provided an officially sanctioned system of state-supported “primary elections”, ousting the bosses and machines of their control, in order to vest it in “the people”. The innovation spread throughout the country in just a few years, becoming nearly universal.

    Each state created a different system at the time, some requiring actual enrollment as a party member in order to vote in the primary, others merely recording the primary chosen, and a few like Michigan not requiring any public declaration at all. Once created, those differences have persisted almost unchanged.

    Maybe we've reached a point we can safely undo the great Progressive reform of a century ago. Or maybe not?

  • ebrayton

    The political parties ARE private clubs, not arms of the state. If how they choose candidates is the business of the states, why does the state only make it their business to regulate the two major parties? This clearly privileges those two parties enormously and protects them from competition. The fact that this is done by those who represent those two parties once in power is not a coincidence.

    As for the suggestion that ending state-run primaries would return us to the bad old days of the smoke filled room, I think that's absurd. It wasn't merely the lack of state run primaries that led to that reality, it was the difficulty of travel and communication. In the internet age, this is hardly the situation anymore. And do you really think that the rank and file of the Republican and Democratic parties are going to blindly go along with eliminating their right to vote for their party's nominees in this day and age? Not a chance.

    And of course, you ignored the real substance of this post, which is that neither you nor anyone else should have access to how any citizen voted — whether the primary is run by the state or not. If we would not tolerate or permit the government to merely put how everyone voted on to a website for all to see — and we certainly would not — then there is no reason why anyone should have access to such data. Who we vote for is our own business, and whether we choose to reveal it should be up to us and no one else.

  • ebrayton

    The political parties ARE private clubs, not arms of the state. If how they choose candidates is the business of the states, why does the state only make it their business to regulate the two major parties? This clearly privileges those two parties enormously and protects them from competition. The fact that this is done by those who represent those two parties once in power is not a coincidence.

    As for the suggestion that ending state-run primaries would return us to the bad old days of the smoke filled room, I think that's absurd. It wasn't merely the lack of state run primaries that led to that reality, it was the difficulty of travel and communication. In the internet age, this is hardly the situation anymore. And do you really think that the rank and file of the Republican and Democratic parties are going to blindly go along with eliminating their right to vote for their party's nominees in this day and age? Not a chance.

    And of course, you ignored the real substance of this post, which is that neither you nor anyone else should have access to how any citizen voted — whether the primary is run by the state or not. If we would not tolerate or permit the government to merely put how everyone voted on to a website for all to see — and we certainly would not — then there is no reason why anyone should have access to such data. Who we vote for is our own business, and whether we choose to reveal it should be up to us and no one else.

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