Voter registration is considered public information in many states. Some states even provide the entire database on their website to download. However, voter registration does not include who a person voted for in an election. You are free to augment the database with your own data, of course.
I don't even understand why party affiliation is tracked by the state. What's that good for other than entrenching the two party state? Parties should have their own member lists.
There are states with ‘closed primaries’, where certain elections are only open to registered party voters - ie a Democrat would not be allowed to vote in the Republican primary and vice-versa.
This, and ‘because that’s how we’ve always done it’ are probably the main reasons party affiliation is part of voter registration.
If a party wants to hold a closed primary, can't they do that themselves without help from the government? Why would the government be involved in a party-internal election?
It always interests me how much of the US electoral system is just obviously completely broken from the perspective of outsiders, and it seems strange that people within the US see procedures like this and view them as normal and legitimate.
I'm curious what you see as "obviously completely broken" about the current primary process. Previously, party candidates were chosen via convention, which effectively left the selection process to party elites.
Deleted my previous comment as it didn't directly address your question. I don't know all the history behind it, but in terms of "can", I'm assuming that no, parties were unable to effectively hold a closed primary in a way that was well-run and accessible. And a poorly run primary vote defeats the purpose of having any primary in the first place. Using the state infrastructure and schedule makes the voting process much easier for the average voter, without being a burden to the state political parties.
As to "why" the government should feel obligated to subsidize the process -- because the government has the ostensible goal of facilitating fair and proper elections, and presumably the primary process -- which is not Constitutionally-enshrined -- is a net benefit to the general election, at least compared to selection-by-party-convention. In the future, political parties may decide that it's better to have open primaries, but that's orthogonal to the government providing the voting infrastructure and logistics.
Primaries aren't enshrined in the Constitution, but they became state business in the 1970s because there was a desire to let the average voter have more say in the selection process, which had previously been done via party conventions.
My (very uninformed) guess is that this is cultural. When democracy spread, Europe already had a good system of tracking people. The church was keeping records of every family for hundreds of years already. In contrast, the USA is a country of immigrants where new people without a history came in all the time. Tracking who votes where could not rely on an established system.
Reflect on the fact that 'didn't vote recently' is being used as we speak to suppress voting in the upcoming election. For non-US readers, every state has a Secretary fo State who rather than doing any kind of foreign affairs work like the federal office of that name, primarily oversees paperwork and particularly elections. These Secretaries of State are elected offices and highly politicized, since officeholders can heavily impact the conduct of elections. In Georgia, for example, one of the candidates for Governor is currently Secretary of State, and has put the eligibility of tens of thousands of voters into question in a way that just happens to massively impact likely voters for his opponent.
I agree, and in that context, having name, party affiliation, and last_voted_at be public record would be the only way for an independent organization to gauge the impact per party of the disenfranchisement.
