There must be 50 ways: Participating in democracy #38: Join--or create--a political party

First, no law says you must register with a political party affiliation, so you can be a registered voter with no noted affiliation. The US government has a helpful website[1] that can direct you to your own state's laws and procedures. The Federal Election Commission[2] also has a website to help you learn how to register a political party once you cross the legal fundraising threshold. 

Every state runs voting in its own way, which might seem weird in the sense that it gives strange options to blocs of voters with questionable ethics to vote in primaries based on which party they claim to belong to, but then to vote for their actual preferred candidate in the general election. 

So investigate what seems accepted in your state and choose any identification that you feel represents your personal values. The range is enormous, but the main two parties, of course, have the vast majority of registered voters. The totals in the US have a general upward trend,[3] which makes sense as the population grows, with a seesaw of more during the presidential election years and somewhat fewer in the midterms. The total is more than 160 million, though far fewer actually vote, so your registration, your affiliation, and your actual participation can be critical. Even US Senate races get decided by small handfuls of votes out of the millions of registered voters eligible and the margins for all offices can be quite small[4]. Even in our country with all our millions, it can come down to a very few--and of course the counterfactuals are worth considering. 

·       What if Florida Democrats had turned out 538 more votes for Gore in 2000? Would Gore have ordered the invasion and occupation of Iraq?

·       What if 313 fewer Democrats voted for Al Franken in the 2008 race for US Senate? Franken won by just 312 votes out of more than 2.4 million cast by Minnesota voters that year. Would the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) have passed into law or not?

·       An old friend of mine won his seat on the county board literally by one vote out of thousands cast. I was so relieved I could tell him that I got out and voted that day!

These stories are just common enough to help us all understand our power and our obligations to participate.

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[1] https://www.usa.gov/change-voter-registration

[2] https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/registering-political-party/

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273743/number-of-registered-voters-in-the-united-states/

[4] https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/01/small-margins-a-look-back-at-the-closest-votes