‘My vote is thrown into the trash’: Independents locked out as primaries take center stage

NEW YORK — Ed Brady knows his ballot won’t count. But when New York holds its primary, the 69-year-old independent will ask for one anyway.

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“I get a provisional ballot knowing that it’s not going to count, because in a few weeks, I’m going to get a letter from the board of elections saying that my vote didn’t count,” Brady, a veteran, told MS NOW. He estimated that he’s collected about eight of these letters over the years. 

He keeps at it.

“I want them to know that I am there, even though basically my vote is thrown into the trash,” he said.

New York is one of more than 20 states and Washington, D.C., that requires voters to register or affiliate with a political party in order to vote in primaries. Brady refuses to, calling mandatory party registration a barrier to the ballot box. 

Now, as states scramble to redraw congressional maps in hopes of locking in more reliably red or blue seats before November, one question is gaining urgency: Just how much say will voters have, and at what stage of the process?

Gerrymandered maps push the real contest into the primary — sidelining voters like Brady from participating in the stage of the process where the result is effectively decided.

“The primary becomes … for most Americans, the only election where there’s any uncertainty,” said John Opdycke, founder and president of Open Primaries, a group that advocates for changing election rules around closed primaries.

His yearslong campaign now collides not just with the heated, partisan redistricting push, but also with a growing number of Americans calling themselves “independent.” More than 39 million Americans are not registered with either major party and/or identify as independents, according to government estimates. 

Among them is Jeff Aron, another New Yorker who has grudgingly sat out his state’s primaries for years. 

Every election season, he recalled, “Somebody calls up and says, ‘Are you going to vote?’ and I say, ‘Well, I can’t, I’m an independent.’ They said, ‘Well, you could register as a Democrat.’”

Aron allows that, indeed, he could.