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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?
The thing about granting powers exclusively to a group: those powers are worth money, and so they are used as bargaining chips much like any other property. The major political parties have something to sell, which is control over who can become president, and so they are likely to be "captured" by special interest groups and commercial interests. This is how it usually happens in democracy, but with a twist, because our "checks and balances" have created many gatekeepers, each of which has a "power property" to sell.
Debbie Wasserman-Schulz said straight out the super delegates were put in place to ensure party insiders would win against grassroots candidates.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
More than half of Americans think the whole election process is rigged, not just nominations.
Oh here's more
More than half of Americans don't care to actually catch up on candidates' positions or who for that matter care who they vote for. They vote along party lines because that's what dear old grannie did or those nice politicians promised me free shit.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The nominating process is defined by the Party. A Private entity.
Since it exists in a private organization, there is no legal obligation to be "fair", despite the context of Primaries and political parties, which kind of suggests fair voting and representation.
Interesting.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The super delegates problem is a side effect of the same thing that has Clinton leading, which is that insiders chose their candidate years ago. Hillary is leading because the media, owned by that same insider group, plays her constant lip service and has for well over a year leading up to this election. Other owned politicians are similarly playing her lip service. There is little to no talk about the corruption in her public service, no talk about how she openly panders and lies to do so, and no talk about her political past as the first lady which would harm her campaign.
Early on, she won how many tie breakers by coin toss exactly? Winning because of votes my ass! She is winning because voters were given a horrible choice and even when they pick the "evil socialist" option they were revoked by this system you claim she is "winning".
Over 50% of the public thinks the system is rigged, the rest are either blind or have not looked into it. There is that .01% or so who know it's rigged and fight tooth and nail to keep it that way. They are happy to pay turds to claim "it's fair" despite how easy it is to prove that it's anything but "fair".
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
This is not people "waking up". That might have applied during the hanging chad fiasco of the W/Gore election, but this is way beyond that.
What has actually happened is there's a demographic shift in the majority of the voting public. This is the last election where the Baby Boomers will hold any major sway in the election and it frightens the heck out of the establishment because they're about to lose control. The largest voting bloc going forward is going to be digital natives and early adoption digital immigrants.
These are people who didn't have limited resources that they could scour endlessly for rote memorization. Instead they have vast information access at their fingertips and have to filter through to find the truth. It's gone from "knowing a few things about something" to "being able to find anything". While those kids may come across as lazy and tuned out, they have the ability to run circles around the establishment for researching what's really going on. The speed at which information travels is still too much for the major political parties to fathom. They can't rely on smoke, mirrors and a complicit mass media anymore. They either have to change or get pushed out.
Sticking to the "Oh they're finally waking up?" narrative is just trying to frame it in the establishments favor. They aren't waking up, they woke up years ago, now they're pissed off because the party is overtly (Thanks for the admission, Wasserman-Schultz) screwing them over and they can actively see it. How many states had major issues during caucus events that led to voters feeling like they were intentionally hindered? How many now have lawsuits or were threatened with lawsuits based on this?
Kings only stay kings as long as the masses let them.
I'd prefer Trump over Cruz because a Republican Congress and Senate probably wouldn't work with Trump very well. There's enough animosity between the two that I could see them fighting over almost everything where Cruz would work well. Plus I don't like how Cruz's first instinct is to carpet bomb foreign countries.
What would be really interesting is if Trump doesn't get enough delegates to win in the first round and they give the nomination to Cruz so Trump runs as an independent and Sanders decides to do the same. I hope that not just one side doesn't split and run as an independent.
Actually I just really feel sorry for the lack of choice the voters have.
The other half are as stupid as a rock.
Blaming the parties may be missing the root cause -- that our archaic plurality voting system eventually fosters a two-party system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The main problem is that understanding how voting is broken is tougher than coming to terms with climate change or unisex bathrooms. As long as people are content to get into shouting matches over their favorite political grapplers while ignoring that they are actually watching the equivalent of the WWF and not the Olympics, nothing will change.
It is rigged, and it should be. Political parties are not part of the government. They're private entities. They can nominate whoever they want. I don't care how they do it, whether they poll their members or read tarot cards or have some secret shadowy figure choose from in the back of a smoke-filled room. Parties should choose their candidates in pretty much any way except via primaries. At least, any way except taxpayer-paid primaries. If the parties want to foot the bill for the time and effort expended to poll the general public, more power to them.
The appalling part isn't how the candidates are chosen by the parties. It's how the electoral system is rigged to keep the two big parties in power. The whole thing is set up to encourage an Us-versus-Them attitude. If anyone votes for a candidate without a (D) or (R) after their name they're just "throwing their vote away". There's no way in hell that any third-party presidential candidate is going to get a majority or even a plurality of votes.
That's the part that needs to be fixed. Switch to an instant run-off system or something else that encourages votes for who people really want to lead, rather than just encouraging votes against the worst guy. Change parties to an advisory system, where instead of running a candidate every party endorses one (or more) candidates. And get rid of the fscking (D) and (R) after the candidates' names, like their sole job is to represent the party's interest. We're not voting a party into the presidency, we're voting an individual in there. Let's minimize the party influence, or we're going to continue to be governed by unelected party officials who are pulling the candidates' strings.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
The U.S. Constitution doesn't specifically mandate a two-party system, and it poses no *legal* barriers to form a third party. But unlike a parliamentary democracy, the winner-take-all elections proscribed in the Constitution guarantee that third parties will fail.
We all revere the parts of the Constitution that we like (the Bill of Rights) but the main part of the U.S. Constitution has some major design errors. Winner-take-all elections are one of those. The writers of the Constitution weren't looking carefully for such flaws, because back then, constitutions were things that you wrote, used for a while, then crumpled up and rewrote at another convention. It was widely assumed the document would be rewritten or at least amended, perhaps during their own lifetimes. Everyone "knew" that back then.
But over time the U.S. Constitution has gained the aura of a religious text written by ancient prophets. The people who wrote it would have been shocked if you told them that it would last more than 200 years, and that every word in their letters to each other would be endlessly analyzed and reinterpreted like the Apostle Paul's Letter to the Romans. Since they knew they wouldn't live forever, they specified that the interpretation of their document would be the job of the Supreme Court. Recently the Court started ignoring case law and started holding seances to divine what the opinions of these dead men would be about current issues. But 21st century jurisprudence wasn't a responsibility that they expected to shoulder from beyond the grave.
If they had known two centuries ago that medical progress would lengthen the lives of judges well into their years of senility, they might have reconsidered lifetime appointments for them. They certainly didn't expect that judges would become senile enough to extend First Amendment protections specifically to the solicitation of bribes by members of Congress- effectively *mandating* that a Congressman's first duty is no longer legislating, but asking people for bribes, in the name of "free speech".
The framers were smart enough to put in a mechanism for adding Amendments, and this worked for a long time. But like so many other things in the Constitution, this has gotten hollowed out and rendered meaningless in a thousand little different ways. There is realistically no chance that any Amendment will ever get passed again.
No great empire can support itself for more than several centuries before forgetting its roots and entering decline; that has been true throughout human history- for the Romans, the Mayans, the Ottomans, the ancient Egyptians, and now the US and Western Europe. The United States has entered a new phase, where a plutocratic oligarchy governs with an iron fist while still operating within the hollowed-out structure of the former democracy that it replaced.
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.