Memorial Day: Vets Deserve to Vote in Every Election

Fresh off Memorial Day Weekend, we’re left thinking about what the holiday really means (and no, it’s not simply “the official start of Potato Salad Season”).

Memorial Day is about honoring the legacy of our veterans who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country.  Yet sadly, Pennsylvania continues to let down our living veterans and active duty service members: it bars far too many from voting in primary elections.

Why? Because half of Pennsylvania’s veterans identify as political independents (more so than almost any other demographic group). And that makes sense — in the words of veteran and Steelers legend Rocky Bleier, our service members, “don’t sign up to serve the Red Team or the Blue Team. They serve the Red, White, and Blue Team.”

So while PA’s closed primaries do a disservice to all voters, they’re especially unfair to veterans, since so many vets are independents. Which brings us back to Memorial Day: what better way to honor our veterans than by granting them the right to fully participate in the democracy they fought to protect?

Our clients at Ballot PA are doing just that: they’ve launched a Memorial Day campaign aimed at ensuring that every PA veteran has the right to vote in every election.  Click the button below to learn more about how closed primaries disenfranchise veterans, and to take action to contact your own state legislators (many of whom are vets themselves) to urge them to repeal closed primaries.