Voting in Indiana's Primary

I did not vote in this year's Indiana primary. If you have been following me under the Supervised Life label, you might have noticed my silence on the primary election. I have not lived in Muncie long enough to know the local candidates. In the Fall, I plan on voting a straight ticket. Used to be I knew Republicans who were better people than their Democrat opponents. No longer can I see safety in supporting Republicans.

Catching up on my email included reading Bill Moreau's Trying to improve turnout in Indiana’s partisan primary elections misses the point in Nuvo. Some interesting information:

The system works perfectly for the parties: 86% of registered voters—4,074,183 presumably far less partisan Hoosiers—stayed home on May 3 and thereby checked out on selecting the November candidates, many of whom will run unopposed in gerrymandered districts.

There seems to be an assumption that all voters belong to one of two parties. Could be that people did not vote for the reason I did not. Could be there is a swath of independent voters who are being ignored by and ignoring the major parties.

More interesting than numbers are these proposals:

We propose a debate that asks two important questions:

1. Are there public offices that should be appointed rather than elected?  For example, do we trust the County Commissioners to appoint the county engineer but not the surveyor?
2. For the remaining county offices, we agree should be elected, why must it be a contest between a Democrat and a Republican?  For those offices, how about an open, nonpartisan primary in May followed by an election between the top two vote-getters in November?

 I find the nonpartisan primary most interesting. I would reconsider the whole primary thing - make it an open election with a run off for the final decision. Yes, this might cause a conflict with federal elections but I cannot see it being insurmountable. I just don't have time at the moment between rising snd going to work to do the research.

One other takeaway from the article is finding out about the website Indiana Citizen.

sch 6/11/22