Voter Registration With No Party Affiliation: How do you do that?

[GustavsGos]

In the last election, I noticed that on my absentee ballot I was registered with a party that I do not affiliate myself with. Towards the election I was getting all kinds of phone calls from this party encouraging me to go out and vote despite the fact that I was not going to vote for their candidate. The last time I noticed this and made some inquiries to change my registration status, I registered "Independent" only to find that I was now registered with the Independent Party.

I want to register to vote, but I do not want to be affiliated with any political party. Shouldn't I be able to do this? Imagine I am a recent (legal) immigrant to this country trying to register to vote, it seems like a real deceitful thing to do to insist they register with a party when they hardly know what is going on. Since when am I legally obliged to register with a party in order to be able to vote? Is that constitutional?

 

[NYClex]

you are not. On the voter registration form there is a box: "no party affiliation" which you have to mark.

It might be that some people mistake "independent" with "no party affiliation"

 

[GustavsGos]

Even better...

Actually, you can even go further than that. The box says something like "... decline to state party... ". This is even better. Apparently there is nothing constitutional about declaring a party at all. It is none of the government's business to know what the party affiliations of the voters are. You can even be a Republican or a Democrat and not state what your party is as a matter of registration.

 

[GustavsGos]

One week later...

It's been a week and I called in to check to see if my re-registration had gone through. They said that there was a bunch of registrations that had come in after the election and they were going through them.

We'll give them another week.

 

[GustavsGos]

I am now "nonpartisan"

Another week has gone by and I've checked to find that I am registered "nonpartisan".