Open Primaries will change how voters view general elections. My guess is that open primaries will only operate in safe seats.
In the couple of hundred seats that will very rarely change hands voters will want a direct say in selecting the candidate who will carry the colours of the certain winner.
The practice I guess will be different in marginal seats. Here closed primaries will operate with only party members choosing the candidate. The electorate then will decide which of the party candidates they prefer in a general election.
But in safe seats the voters will know the real contest will be in the primary. They will push to select a candidate nearest to their views.
This will not only make controlling MPs in Parliament more difficult - people will have direct mandates for their particular views from their own constituents - but I guess that once open primaries are established in safe seats, the voters' interest in general elections will largely collapse.
We will therefore have as we did in the middle of the nineteenth century a very large number of seats being uncontested at the general election.
Shouldn't the money for open primaries therefore to come from the same source as general election funding? If the cost of general elections fall as a result of open primaries, what would be wrong in transferring those 'unspent sums' to financing open primaries?
When Labour came to power in 1997 we were fixated with the idea of spending to save, i.e. spend now to save lots of money later.
Shouldn't such a similar campaign begin in spending some of the general election money up front in order to safeguard democracy?
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