Save the taxpayer some dollars

I have held for a long time that primaries should not be in the public venue, but are a private internal party concern. Saves tax dollars for starters! In Convention a party can select who they send to the voters.

The Kennedy democrats of the 1960s had their party stolen from them by the extreme left. Once a moderate party, representing the working man, found themselves with no home, they gave up trying to regain control of their party and decided it would be an easier path to take over the republican party [the birth of the Republican In Name Only] with the help of the left. The left was more than willing to help because their hatred of the republicans runs deep.

It is Democratic Party cross-over voting is the mother's milk of Montanan's RINO population. One ‘yardstick’ is the vote percentages from previous general elections. If percentages are skewed heavily in the primaries, one can BET crossover voting occurs. These liberal Republicans are keenly aware that they would have never been elected to office in their strongly GOP districts were it not for The Divine Intervention of the Democrats in their primary. It makes zero sense for the other party's voters to, in essence, select their opposition's nominee. This betrays the whole concept of a two-party system, and the integrity of the primary process itself. The net effect is to deny general election voters a genuine choice. The result is the two parties are reduced to one.

Two suggestions: Either (1) work for closed primaries, or (2) work for a system of nomination by convention instead. The appeal of convention-based nominating is that the parties, not the taxpayers, are footing the bill for an essentially private process.

Lark Chadwick

Thompson Falls, MT