Letter to the Editor

I just read your article about the decrease in registered Democrats and increase in unaffiliated voters. It stated that Connecticut has a closed primary system. I believe that many people do not understand what that means.

My stepmother, who has lived in Kent, CT, for 50 years, tried to support a candidate in last year’s primary and was very upset that she wasn’t allowed to vote because she is registered as an Independent.

In 2020, while I was waiting on a line in New York to vote in the election, I overheard two women in front of me discussing the fact that one of them was voting for the first time in her life. She was in at least her mid 30s and had a job in marketing, so presumably relatively intelligent. She said she had recently registered as an Independent, but it wasn’t until the other woman educated her a bit that she learned that meant she would not be able to vote in either a Republican or Democratic primary in the future.

So I think it would be helpful to your readers going forward if you included a brief explanation of what a closed primary is and the impact of party affiliation on voting in primaries.

Heidi DeVos
Goshen