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Half Of Americans Think Presidential Nominating System 'Rigged' (huffingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Huffington Post: More than half of American voters believe that the system U.S. political parties use to pick their candidates for the White House is "rigged" and more than two-thirds want to see the process changed. The results echo complaints from Republican front-runner Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders that the system is stacked against them in favor of candidates with close ties to their parties -- a critique that has triggered a nationwide debate over whether the process is fair. The United States is one of just a handful of countries that gives regular voters any say in who should make it onto the presidential ballot. But the state-by-state system of primaries, caucuses and conventions is complex. The contests historically were always party events, and while the popular vote has grown in influence since the mid-20th century, the parties still have considerable sway. Just the other day, a poll was conducted by Harvard University showing a majority of young people do not support capitalism. Are the times they are a changin' or are people starting to wake up?
They should be able to nominate whoever they want, in whatever method they want, fair or not. The real problem is that they get special privileges. They are using the federal and state governments to legitimize and pay for their primaries. Let the political parties run and pay for their own primaries. The state and federal government should only facilitate the candidacy of individuals to public office, it should not even acknowledge the existence of political parties. Maybe if we pretend for long enough, it will come true.
Why the hell is this submission on the front page of Slashdot, of all sites?!
I can understand political submissions if they're somehow, in some very small way, related to science, or technology, or math, or something relevant like that.
But this submission? It's about politics and nothing but politics. It isn't even about politics at any meaningful level. It's politics within the goddamn parties themselves!
There is absolutely nothing relevant about this submission at all.
Even the "stuff that matters" excuse doesn't work here. And don't waste your time with the "skip submissions you don't like", either.
Things were looking up after Dice sold the site. But since then I've been finding myself more and more disappointed. This submission is a great example. It's irrelevant, and it references the goddamn Huffington Post of all sources!
If I wanted to read shitty content like this, then I'd go visit the Huffington Post site directly! But I don't want to, and that's why I'm at Slashdot. I'm here for the science, tech, math and computing news that I can't find on other sites.
Please, editors, don't ignore the importance of Slashdot being a niche site! Trying to cater to a wider audience won't work, and will be the quickest way to destroy this site.
Actually, she's not winning free and clear; most of her significant wins have a cloud of large-scale voter suppression over them.
http://usuncut.com/politics/ne...
http://www.democracynow.org/20...
http://thinkprogress.org/polit...
And huge number of affidavit ballots cast in New York have simply not been counted.
Across the country, voters that have long been registered Democrat have discovered their registration details tampered to make their participation in closed primaries impossible. The door to this was left open when 191 million voter records were leaked, making re-registration with edited details trivial. The earlier scandal over the DNC voter records being open allow for specific targeting of those not supporting Clinton which is the demographic reporting issues.
http://heavy.com/news/2016/04/...
Quite simply, yes, there's overwhelming signs that this election is being heavily rigged and in dirty
The presidential election needs runoff elections, not primaries.
Runoff election 1 should allow anyone who can raise a million signatures to be on the ballot nationally. This would require enough time and organization to keep out the joke candidates and the true crackpots, but still allow for niche candidates or underdogs to get onto the ballot if they can demonstrate some legwork.
Runoff election 2 should be made up of the top 10 vote getters in runoff 1. That's enough to still give minor candidates exposure, but will all but assure crackpots don't make the cut.
Both runoff elections should be open and party-independent. You can label yourself by an actual party or none at all.
The top 4 candidates from runoff 2 should be on the final ballot in November and the winner decided by ranked choice voting. No party dependencies. If the top 4 end up being 3 Democrats and 1 Republican, so be it, the three Democrats are offering enough unique value to the electorate that they don't feel the need to dump all but one.
The existing system sucks because of the ridiculous state by state nature of ballots. I fine with devolved government, but devolving the method of electing a common president is lunacy, and it makes it extraordinarily hard for a third party to get much traction.
This results in third parties being dismissed as ineffective and forces independent minded candidates like Trump or Sanders to identify with a major party and be subject to rules and a party establishment that has other ideas. I get it, parties are private, but you face impossible odds if you're not a major party candidate, which gives ridiculous power to two parties to control who's even available as an option.
The process of selecting who ends up on the final ballot should be wide open. Democrats or Republicans or Libertarians or National Socialists can have whatever process they want for their own internal candidate choice, but it should not be a determinant for who is actually available to be voted for by the public.
If it's rigged, then it's rigged in the parties and only the party members who bother to show up at the party meetings should be complaining about it. Someone passively calling themselves a Democrat without being involved in the party really has no leg to stand on when they complain it's rigged. In some sense, the party primaries aren't even supposed to be "fair" to the public, they're only intended to be fair to the active members of the party (those who are involved in party business as opposed to those who just vote in primaries after having checked a box on a form).
The Republicans and the Democrats decided that having a public primary would work best for them. The primaries have several tasks to fulfill: weed out candidates with not enough appeal to a broader electorate, prepare the candidates for the general election battle, find the topics and the positions on those topics that get votes, raise the candidates to prominence and create some trade mark to use for the advertising campaigns.
The Republicans for instance found out that their conservative platform of "small government, family values, promote free trade everywhere" does not get enough votes, as their voting base wants something else. The Democrats found out, that a big part of their voting base is leaning toward more socialist recipes, not enough yet to unsettle the party itself, but a trend to watch for as it seems to appeal especially to younger people.
Any party, even both Democrats and Republicans, could decide that public primaries aren't the best tools for them anymore, and look for a new way to find their candidates. They could throw dices or hold a public poker tournament, they could have only a single, U.S. wide primary election for their candidates, they could have each local organisation send a delegate to a state conference, and then each state conference send a delegate to a U.S. conference, which then decides for a candidate from the delegates, they could just put up an announcement in the classified "election canditate wanted, apply at party headquarters" or whatever they think will get them a candidate with a high chance of winning the next elections. Primaries are not a given. They have just proven to work for both big parties.