The House Campaign & Finance Subcommittee will hear discussion about HB0405 on Wednesday at noon, CST. 

If passed, the bill would require Tennessee voters to declare a party affiliation before voting in any primary election. This matters because:

• Unaffiliated and independent voters won't be allowed to vote in Republican and Democrat primaries.
• Primary elections are paid for by taxpayers, and this will exclude many of those same taxpayers from voting in these primaries. 
• Roughly 50 percent of veterans consider themselves independent voters, which means they will be excluded from the same democratic process they fought to defend. 
• Unaffiliated and independent voters can be prevented from serving as poll workers. 
• The state of Tennessee will have to re-register all voters if this legislation passes, retrain election workers, and revamp election administration, at a cost of millions of dollars. (So the taxpayers will fund the two-party effort to exclude voters from the primary process.)

The General Assembly has already moved to ban ballot innovations like instant runoff, and now they're coming after our primaries. 

Read the bill here. 

Use the document below to find your representative and access a ready-to-send email that tells them to keep our primaries open.