22 February 2015

Voter registration by party carries risk of losing one’s job

Here’s another reason so many Montanans find a closed primary anathema: it requires registration by political party — and belonging to what your employer considers the wrong party could get you fired or denied a deserved promotion.

Alina Tugend of the New York Times explains:

…if you’re a nonunion private employee, your boss has great latitude to control your political actions. As Lee Tien, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, put it, “You don’t have the right to speak freely in the workplace.” Or even outside it.

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For private employees, who account for about 85 percent of the work force, the First Amendment’s guarantee offers no protection from being fired for something you’ve said, either in the workplace or outside of it, as on social media. That’s because the amendment addresses actions by the government to impede free speech, not by the private sector.

I think this is a major reason why so many voters identify themselves as independents when we know that most of them actually have distinct partisan leanings. They’re aware that a hyperpartisan employer can obtain voter registration lists easily and use them to determine the political affiliation of an employee or applicant for a job. Doing so might be dubious legally, but there’s no practical way to prevent it from happening. An employer, or his stooge, could simply purchase the voter list after filing for office.

Registering as an independent eliminates that risk, but deprives the voter of a voice in the primary, leaving the selection of the candidates to the most partisan and left or right leaning of the voters. That produces further polarization, which is what the advocates for a closed primary really want.

An open primary protects voters from vindictive employers.