You Should Know

Canadian here, we don't do that either. Primaries is one of the many additional structural barriers to representive voting being adopted in the US and a step away from having more than two parties in their system. It also increases the campaign costs for candidates and exacerbates the issues with first past the post voting meaning running people becomes an exclusive exercise for the wealthy or people with wealthy patrons who make handshake agreements.

As I understand it, Instead of having parties internally figure out who they are running on the docket as party head like sane people they open it up to basically a second first past the post election of internal candidates. You register as a member of those parties when you register to vote to participate (or not) in the election before the actual election. Personally to one outside that system that just seems like an additional bundle of problems to deal with by doubling down an already outdated voting system that creates further issues of populism but some Americans are very fond of archaic systems. You know something something founders of our nation blah blah can't change anything our fathers who art in 6ft of dirt didn't personally come up with blah.

Forgive my glibness. Being a neighbour is hard sometimes.

I’m Ireland we use proportional representation

America does not do that.

To participate in the party's election of a candidate. So you select a candidate within the party and then select the winner from the candidates each party selected.

Technically you don't have to be affiliated to run for office. But once you're talking about federal offices that route is functionally restricted to billionaires. And voters who are unaffiliated just don't get the first round of voting. So it's highly incentivized to affiliate.

In America, the government doesn't technically have the right to know where you live. You don't automatically get to vote without registering because the government doesn't necessarily know where you live. You have to give your address to get a driver's license, so often that government office also does voter registration.

Before our elections, we have primaries. That's where each party picks who the candidates are from that party, but they are a state-run event. Technically a party doesn't need to do this, they could just submit their candidate to the final election. Every state does it a little differently, but in many states, you need to declare which party you are a part of in order to take part in the decision for who that party is sending to the election. In some states, it's optional, and when you go to vote in a primary, you tell them which party you want to select the candidate for, and they give you that ballot. Other states are weird and do what's called "caucusing", where everyone from a particular party within that voting district meets up, and they try to come to a decision on which candidate to send forward. In those states, it's not a blind vote, but you essentially get a sort of instant runoff, at least in my understanding.

It looks like in Ireland, since you have multiple parties, you have more options at your elections, so you don't have to help the parties pick their candidates?

Because they're doing it by mistake. They're intending to register to vote as independent (no party aligned) voters, seeing "Independent" under party, and choosing that.