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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.
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.
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.