In a lot of countries voting is by secret ballot so why in the US do people have their affiliation publicly registered? The point of secret ballots is to avoid harassment from political opponents, is this not a problem over there?
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The long and the short of it is this.
In most countries political parties are responsible for choosing their own parties internally and doing it on their OWN DIME. In the US, the two big parties have found a way to make the public pay for their internal party candidate choosing. They are still the ones responsible for organizing and selecting, they just outsource the funding of it to the government. The other parties, Green, Libertarian etc don’t have this luxury and have to pay for their own party primaries.
So the whole “registering” as a Dem or Rep is so they can keep people from voting in both party primaries. It doesn’t in anyway tie you down to a party, and is not unheard of for a person if one political persuasion to vote in the other party’s primary to influence the candidate selection for the general election.
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