Last month I wrote an article concerning the use of Unaligned Primaries to help broaden the pool of candidates for selection at a local level. The difference being, that individuals registered as Independent belong to no party and seek to vote in the primaries of either democrats or republicans.  I did not think that it really was fair to the parties to have an independent vote in the primary election of their party because of the potential element of subversion of intent (voting for someone that has no chance of winning) and was inherently unfair to the parties to have non-registered people vote in their primaries.

In the previous article, I focused on local elections and how it would be more possible for single-issue candidates, far left as well as far right candidates to be elected. In this article, I would like to concentrate on a national election and the impacts.

Independents are independent of party… Independents have no party and a Gallup Poll taken in 2014 identified that 43 percent of the voters are registered as independent. Democrats were at 30 percent and Republicans were at 26 percent of the registered voters. Primaries have a smaller turn out of voters, both democrat and republican, which means that a small percentage of registered voters are deciding the candidate for the national general election. 

There were about 125.9 million adult women in the United States in 2014 and the number of men was 119.4 million. In 2016 there were 200,081,377 registered voters.  I am sure that there were less in 2014. but we will use the 2016 number to be conservative. 

More than 57.6 million people, or 28.5 percent of estimated eligible voters, voted in the Republican and Democratic presidential primaries last year. That is 28.4 percent of the 30 percent of democrats (17,046,933) and 28.4 percent of republicans (14,774,008).  There would be some independents that were allowed to vote, so those numbers are conservative, but it is being set forth for illustration purposes that a very small percentage of people select and candidate and around 43 percent of the registered voters do not have a say. 

There is not a big number determining who gets on the ballot, and that makes it easier for guys like Grover Norquist to threaten people to vote in one direction or he and his organization will direct resources and voters to someone who will. The numbers keep getting smaller and smaller as you look at this process, when you take into account gerrymandering. There needs to be a change.

By virtue of being an independent, you have no party. The only way to address the issue is to create an independent party, which is a contradiction in terms. When one declares one is independent, that does not mean they belong to an independent party.  An Unaligned primary would allow for someone to break this block of party of the incumbent. 

In an unaligned primary for president, you could have different people on the ballot in each state.  I am sure people would try to get on all 50 ballots, but there could be people win in each different state. It could mean, in an extreme, that there are 50 individual candidates for President, as well as the two parties and the fringe party candidates. I believe that there may end up being some regional conservative candidates who are strong in the south or the west, and probably a strong liberal candidate from the northeast. 

If this were to take place, the election would probably go to the House of Representatives each election, and the majority party would choose the winner.  If there could to be a change to the popular vote, with the unaligned candidates suddenly being able to win, a candidate could win with less than a majority of the voters, but the dynamic of change would then guide the process.

Basically it would empower 43 percent of the electorate to potentially just vote unaligned, and elect a consensus candidate who may not even be a politician.  I believe we elected a non-politician this time and we found that support from both parties waned once the election was over.  The current President, by not being a politician, continues to make novice mistakes, which are blown out of proportion by veteran politicos. I do not think the new President is a bad guy but he is definitely a non-politician.

If and unaligned candidate would win, both parties could fight to block the president, rather than work with him and chaos would develop. Transfer of power does not come easy, and the unaligned candidate could offer a great leader who would act as a people’s president.  As I said in my last article, I think it would have to be tried on a local level before it went to a national election, just because it was so much of a change that the process would need to be accepted on a local level to familiarize people with the national rollout.

Big money and partisanship is ruining out archaic system, which was designed in a simpler time. It took a couple hundred years for this to develop, but with the concentration of wealth and the targeting of Republican lawmakers by right leaning oligarchs on one side and demagogism of political correctness on the democratic side… it is time to come up with a different process for selecting our leader.