NEW YORK — Ed Brady knows his ballot won’t count. But when New York holds its primary, the 69-year-old independent will ask for one anyway.

“I get a provisional ballot knowing that it’s not going to count, because in a few weeks, I’m going to get a letter from the board of elections saying that my vote didn’t count,” Brady, a veteran, told MS NOW. He estimated that he’s collected about eight of these letters over the years. 

He keeps at it.

“I want them to know that I am there, even though basically my vote is thrown into the trash,” he said.

New York is one of more than 20 states and Washington, D.C., that requires voters to register or affiliate with a political party in order to vote in primaries. Brady refuses to, calling mandatory party registration a barrier to the ballot box. 

Now, as states scramble to redraw congressional maps in hopes of locking in more reliably red or blue seats before November, one question is gaining urgency: Just how much say will voters have, and at what stage of the process?

Gerrymandered maps push the real contest into the primary — sidelining voters like Brady from participating in the stage of the process where the result is effectively decided.

“The primary becomes … for most Americans, the only election where there’s any uncertainty,” said John Opdycke, founder and president of Open Primaries, a group that advocates for changing election rules around closed primaries.

His yearslong campaign now collides not just with the heated, partisan redistricting push, but also with a growing number of Americans calling themselves “independent.” More than 39 million Americans are not registered with either major party and/or identify as independents, according to government estimates. 

Among them is Jeff Aron, another New Yorker who has grudgingly sat out his state’s primaries for years. 

Every election season, he recalled, “Somebody calls up and says, ‘Are you going to vote?’ and I say, ‘Well, I can’t, I’m an independent.’ They said, ‘Well, you could register as a Democrat.’”

Aron allows that, indeed, he could.

“But I’m not,” he continued. “I’m an independent. I’m not a Democrat, I’m not a Republican; I’m an independent, and I don’t feel like I want to lie. I don’t want to tell people that I’m something I’m not in order to get my voice heard.”

Torsha Childs ran into the same wall. An independent, she moved back to her home state of New York after living in Georgia, an open-primary state, for six years. 

“Coming back to New York and realizing that I could not vote in the primaries was really like a slap in the face,” Childs, 54, told MS NOW. “In the beginning, I did go and change my affiliation so that I could vote — and then I just got tired of it, and I decided, you know what? No more.” 

Childs’ dilemma could soon grow more common. A 2025 Gallup poll found that the share of Americans identifying as independents is trending upward and at a 37-year high.

Not everyone agrees that opening primaries produces better outcomes. Party leaders and defenders of closed systems argue the rules shield parties from outside meddling while letting committed members shape their own slates.

That argument is playing out in Texas, where just this month, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott told attendees at his state party’s convention that “we are going to make clear that in the future, only Republicans vote in Republican primaries.”

Still, voters like Brady, Childs and Aron are hoping for change — with new urgency as they watch the maps and the stakes shift around them. 

“This is a situation in which the politicians are trying to choose the voters, not have the voters choose the politicians, and that’s wrong,” Aron said. “That’s not what democracy is.”

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