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I think the most interesting (and perhaps hopeful) aspect here is that people now have an expectation of fairness in the selection of party candidates. That's a

I think the most interesting (and perhaps hopeful) aspect here is that people now have an expectation of fairness in the selection of party candidates. That's a relatively new phenomenon. In the past, I think people widely assumed that the party was biased towards individual candidates. Even now, that's clearly the case when the sitting President is a candidate. I personally think that expecting an unbiased party structure is unrealistic, given the very nature of the organization. The party doesn't have a product, other than its opinion. The idea that an organization of partisans only arrives at that collective opinion through primaries and caucuses seems quite naive to me.

EdHominem 10y ago
It's not the issue that there are inputs other than the wishes of the delegates, it's that those other inputs almost totally override the delegates and make the whole thing a sham. As it is, the only purpose the delegates have is to fool people into believing in the result.
DamienSF 10y ago
I am not sure how the findings of this report can reinforce the expectation of fairness in the selection process. The reports points out to evidences of various election fraud tactics (voter suppression, registration tampering, illegal voter purging and fraudulent voting machine tallies) which have been carried out to eventually influence the outcome of the election. Also, I wonder how can the Democratic party can still be credible in denouncing Republicans efforts to suppress voters the right to vote when employing the exact same tactics during the primaries.
- soundwave106 10y ago
  I'd be cautious of this report. This is an American politics advocacy organization. Not to say that this report is incorrect per se, it may be 100% right. But it also may be anything else, ranging from wildly exaggerated to outright wrong. It's very difficult to find sober, factual information in the national American political scene. I looked up one of the referenced incidents -- the botched poll in Arizona -- and based on other articles (see: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/31/arizonas-primary-was-an-utter-disaster-but-was-it-just-a-big-mistake-or-something-more-nefarious/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/31/ar...) it's hard to tell from a bird's eye perspective whether even that was "rigged".. or whether it was mere "incompetence". I know FiveThirtyEight, referenced several times in the paper, (http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-system-isnt-rigged-against-sanders/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-system-isnt-rigged-a...) lean against the "rigged" argument, which is where I stand from a big picture perspective. Political shenanigans always happen, but regardless of this, demographics explain the result of the Democratic primary more than anything else. (That being said, in my opinion, the same demographics should frankly tell the Democratic Party to handle the Sanders supporters much better than they have been so far.)
  - alexandercrohde 10y ago
    I think this comment lowers the quality of the discussion. The comment asks us not take an exhaustively prepared article seriously without providing any evidence. It's as though the comment is trying to prevent overracting, however weigh it against the threat of underreacting. The harm in taking these allegations too seriously (false positive) is doing research and finding out the statistics are invalid (extra research time). The harm in taking these allegations not-seriously-enough (false negative) is mass-scale election fraud. Given how hard it is for such allegations to even be considered at all in our social climate (even when we all know they're much more technically feasible than people would like to admit) I think a defusing this article detracts from pursuit of truth in exchange for peace of mind.
    - rflrob 10y ago
      > The harm in taking these allegations too seriously (false positive) is doing research and finding out the statistics are invalid That's one possible harm, but I think it's also possible that people will take the allegations too seriously and withdraw from the political process entirely. One of the paradoxes of modern political life is that the elections that get the most attention aren't necessarily the ones with the greatest impact on our day-to-day lives. If you don't show up to the polls in November because {Clinton,Trump,Satan} will win anyways because of the rigged system, then you won't vote for mayor, school board, and local bond measures that can much more directly affect the policing policies in your town, the education your kids get, and the transportation infrastructure to get to your places of work or leisure.
      - nitrogen 10y ago
        The difference a few individual voters can make in local elections is certainly huge. Over time I've seen multiple initiatives and candidates I liked or disliked decided on only a handful of votes. However, I don't think this is a sufficient argument to motivate people who would refuse to vote because of the state of the presidential election. I think they would feel that local educational or policing policies are insignificant in comparison to the big-picture changes they now have no say in because their favored candidate was eliminated by corrupt party and media practices. They might still feel that they will be more affected by the year-to-year impact of foreign policy and trade policy than the day-to-day impact of a .1% chance increase of getting a bogus traffic ticket.
- vannevar 10y ago
  The point is that people went to a lot of trouble to study bias in a process that in the past was widely just assumed to be biased. In this case, it's unlikely that the bias affected the overall outcome---Sanders lost by a large margin in the biggest states, a deficit that would be hard to overcome---but I think it does indicate a shift in how people view the parties. The criticisms of hypocrisy are fair, but only go so far. If they violated rules, they were rules of their own making, and not rights granted by the Constitution. Voting for a party nominee is a privilege, and if the party chose to limit the voting pool to party officials only, they could do so without violating anyone's rights. Bernie is free to run as an independent, and his supporters are free to vote for him. If the DNC somehow interfered with that, they would be doing what Republicans are accused of doing with the Voter ID laws.
  - therealjumbo 10y ago
    >The criticisms of hypocrisy are fair, but only go so far. If they violated rules, they were rules of their own making, and not rights granted by the Constitution. That's like saying, "Lying is only a crime when you're under oath. Ergo, the party leaders are free to lie all they want and no harm, no foul."
    - vannevar 10y ago
      Lying is only a crime when it's under oath. Hypocrisy is bad, too, but it's not illegal. And party leaders are free (in the legal sense) to lie all they want, though if they want continued political support it's probably a poor strategy. Before we are too quick to call on the law to support our side, consider what happens when that same law is used against us by our opponents. Right now you may want DNC leaders in jail, but I think it would set a terrible precedent for private political activities to result in imprisonment, regardless of our distaste for them. Again, the situation is very different when peoples' Constitutional voting rights are denied (eg, voting in a real election). Then by all means, legal action should be taken.
      - troyvit 10y ago
        I skimmed the beginning and end of 95 page report, but its recommendations were pretty good: 1) Exclusive use of hand-counted paper ballots in all future US elections. 2) Automatic voter registration, with same-day party affiliation switching as a mandatory condition for all elections that are publicly funded. 3) Restoration of voting rights legislation which would ensure adequate access to polling sites. So it's cool: no jail time for anybody, just better preventative measures.
- harryh 10y ago
  I think that OPs point was that previously reports like this would have been met with a "Well duh. Of course that is what happens. Primaries aren't fair elections." Where as now we are starting to see reports like this be taken seriously because there is a background expectation that primaries are conducted fairly. There is certainly acknowledgement that the current system isn't entirely fair. The change is that an strong desire for fairness now exists where previously it did not.
- troyvit 10y ago
  Yeah both these things are true. A lot of comments in this thread are about how an expectation of fairness at the party level is too much to ask for, and that's fine, but fraud and voter suppression are a whole different level. If it's happening here it's going to happen in the general election too. Waxing political I wonder if Trump will be able to build an infrastructure to hack/disenfranchise as many people as Clinton will since he's not as firmly inserted into the political machine. In other words elections of the future won't be settled by how many votes a candidate wins but by how many votes a candidate steals. Gives a whole new meaning to "Candidate A has locked in the [insert demographic here] vote."
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
brudgers 10y ago
To me there is an unquestioned premise to the article: why should the state [as in "government"] conduct elections on behalf of political parties. Enrolling voters as Democrat or Republican or whatever and then restricting the voter's access to ballot items based upon that enrollment [or non-enrollment] does not seem to be the business of the government. A political party is free to change the rules for nominating candidates however and whenever it chooses. It is free to nullify the decision of those voting in a particular primary. A political party is free to nominate whomever it chooses [and almost certainly multiple candidates for the same office it wishes should it choose]. Ultimately the party, not a judge, chooses whose vote matters and whose doesn't. Placing the imprimatur of the state upon a political party's process doesn't change that or make the process of candidate nomination little 'd' democratic. The people within a political party charged with making the rules for candidate selection are not elected or selected little 'd' democratically. The process of nominating candidates is not little 'd' democratic in any meaningful sense.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  A political party is free to change the rules for nominating candidates however and whenever it chooses. This is something we should take away from them. The outcomes of private party activities shouldn't have any impact on the names that appear on ballots. They can maybe mark the names they choose to endorse as an organization, but we should throw away the system where the parties are directly involved in putting names on the ballot (of course they'd be indirectly involved, as an organized group is, uh, organized and thus more ready to act together, so would have an easy time dealing with ballot petitions).
  - white-flame 10y ago
    There are many barriers to entry to get a name on the ballot, and political parties will rally together to help jump through those hoops to get specific names on. If there were lower barriers to entry, the ballots would be flooded. I think the barriers to entry should likely remain high, but we need an overhaul of the voting system itself to break the two-party system, which itself is just a side-effect of the mechanics of our voting process, not anything mandated. If I remember correctly, early on in the country's history the founders noticed that the mechanics of voting were trending towards a limited two-party system, and that consternated them. Most every (if not actually every) democracy established after the USA has a voting style and representative bodies that allows more parties to coexist, or creative destruction within the set of active parties to thrive.
Ericson2314 10y ago
I'm sympathetic, but without a parliamentary system the US cannot have an effective market of political parties. And without such a market, primaries need to be democratic.
- xenophonf 10y ago
  I'm not sure a parliamentary system is necessary. Instead, I think we need to make three reforms: - non-partisan redistricting - instant runoff voting - automatic voter registration
  - Ericson2314 10y ago
    Is instant runoff like ranked choice?
r_smart 10y ago
Interesting. My take on it is that most people have never paid much attention to the details how candidates are chosen and know they're going to vote with their party anyway or will wait until November to decide on their 'lesser of two evils'. They just never knew how it worked, and probably never expected a voice in the matter. I certainly never paid much attention to this stuff. I would sometimes follow primary candidates and maybe watch a debate or two, but all this stuff about delegates and super delegates etc. was not a thing until this year. This feels like it is quite possibly the longest span a presidential election has held the attention of the voting public. And we've still got quite some time to go.
- vannevar 10y ago
  I think this is right. We don't notice when things run smoothly, only when they go awry. Of course, if you want dramatic political change, "running smoothly" isn't what you're looking for. This nomination was unusual because: a) the nominee in this case wasn't the President or VP, which usually dampens any rival campaign before it gets started; b) the nominee was nonetheless more or less widely regarded as "next in line" in a way usually reserved for the VP; c) the nominee had unusually high negatives; and d) an Independent 'crashed' the Democratic party, bringing a lot of non-party voters with no vested interest in the existing party hierarchy. Had any one of these conditions been different, I don't think we would've seen the same degree of discord.
jswny 10y ago
I don't really understand the outrage. The parties are not part of the government, they aren't held to the same requirements for fairness. The caucuses of the parties are supposed to help them gauge the public perception of their candidates, to help them make a better decision as to which candidate is most likely to win the presidential election. In fact, I expect each party to be biased towards a certain candidate. I expect the party to come together to back the strongest candidate to prevent any possible party fractures. Just look at what happened this time, maybe if the Democrats had gone full-force behind Clinton from the beginning Sanders wouldn't have supporters protesting outside the convention for his very party. Maybe I'm wrong here but I never expected either party to go above and beyond what's required of them and act like they are part of the government.
- Miner49er 10y ago
  They do receive funding from the government though, which comes from taxpayers. Also, the DNC's rules specifically ban bias towards a candidate in the primaries.
- alasdair_ 10y ago
  One obvious issue is that taxpayers money goes to holding these elections. This seems ridiculous.
- DamienSF 10y ago
  Election officials still need to respect election law and the National Voters Right Act which hasn't been the case in many instances according to the report.

EdHominem 10y ago

It's not the issue that there are inputs other than the wishes of the delegates, it's that those other inputs almost totally override the delegates and make the whole thing a sham. As it is, the only purpose the delegates have is to fool people into believing in the result.

DamienSF 10y ago

I am not sure how the findings of this report can reinforce the expectation of fairness in the selection process. The reports points out to evidences of various election fraud tactics (voter suppression, registration tampering, illegal voter purging and fraudulent voting machine tallies) which have been carried out to eventually influence the outcome of the election. Also, I wonder how can the Democratic party can still be credible in denouncing Republicans efforts to suppress voters the right to vote when employing the exact same tactics during the primaries.

soundwave106 10y ago
I'd be cautious of this report. This is an American politics advocacy organization. Not to say that this report is incorrect per se, it may be 100% right. But it also may be anything else, ranging from wildly exaggerated to outright wrong. It's very difficult to find sober, factual information in the national American political scene. I looked up one of the referenced incidents -- the botched poll in Arizona -- and based on other articles (see: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/31/arizonas-primary-was-an-utter-disaster-but-was-it-just-a-big-mistake-or-something-more-nefarious/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/31/ar...) it's hard to tell from a bird's eye perspective whether even that was "rigged".. or whether it was mere "incompetence". I know FiveThirtyEight, referenced several times in the paper, (http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-system-isnt-rigged-against-sanders/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-system-isnt-rigged-a...) lean against the "rigged" argument, which is where I stand from a big picture perspective. Political shenanigans always happen, but regardless of this, demographics explain the result of the Democratic primary more than anything else. (That being said, in my opinion, the same demographics should frankly tell the Democratic Party to handle the Sanders supporters much better than they have been so far.)
- alexandercrohde 10y ago
  I think this comment lowers the quality of the discussion. The comment asks us not take an exhaustively prepared article seriously without providing any evidence. It's as though the comment is trying to prevent overracting, however weigh it against the threat of underreacting. The harm in taking these allegations too seriously (false positive) is doing research and finding out the statistics are invalid (extra research time). The harm in taking these allegations not-seriously-enough (false negative) is mass-scale election fraud. Given how hard it is for such allegations to even be considered at all in our social climate (even when we all know they're much more technically feasible than people would like to admit) I think a defusing this article detracts from pursuit of truth in exchange for peace of mind.
  - rflrob 10y ago
    > The harm in taking these allegations too seriously (false positive) is doing research and finding out the statistics are invalid That's one possible harm, but I think it's also possible that people will take the allegations too seriously and withdraw from the political process entirely. One of the paradoxes of modern political life is that the elections that get the most attention aren't necessarily the ones with the greatest impact on our day-to-day lives. If you don't show up to the polls in November because {Clinton,Trump,Satan} will win anyways because of the rigged system, then you won't vote for mayor, school board, and local bond measures that can much more directly affect the policing policies in your town, the education your kids get, and the transportation infrastructure to get to your places of work or leisure.
    - nitrogen 10y ago
      The difference a few individual voters can make in local elections is certainly huge. Over time I've seen multiple initiatives and candidates I liked or disliked decided on only a handful of votes. However, I don't think this is a sufficient argument to motivate people who would refuse to vote because of the state of the presidential election. I think they would feel that local educational or policing policies are insignificant in comparison to the big-picture changes they now have no say in because their favored candidate was eliminated by corrupt party and media practices. They might still feel that they will be more affected by the year-to-year impact of foreign policy and trade policy than the day-to-day impact of a .1% chance increase of getting a bogus traffic ticket.
vannevar 10y ago
The point is that people went to a lot of trouble to study bias in a process that in the past was widely just assumed to be biased. In this case, it's unlikely that the bias affected the overall outcome---Sanders lost by a large margin in the biggest states, a deficit that would be hard to overcome---but I think it does indicate a shift in how people view the parties. The criticisms of hypocrisy are fair, but only go so far. If they violated rules, they were rules of their own making, and not rights granted by the Constitution. Voting for a party nominee is a privilege, and if the party chose to limit the voting pool to party officials only, they could do so without violating anyone's rights. Bernie is free to run as an independent, and his supporters are free to vote for him. If the DNC somehow interfered with that, they would be doing what Republicans are accused of doing with the Voter ID laws.
- therealjumbo 10y ago
  >The criticisms of hypocrisy are fair, but only go so far. If they violated rules, they were rules of their own making, and not rights granted by the Constitution. That's like saying, "Lying is only a crime when you're under oath. Ergo, the party leaders are free to lie all they want and no harm, no foul."
  - vannevar 10y ago
    Lying is only a crime when it's under oath. Hypocrisy is bad, too, but it's not illegal. And party leaders are free (in the legal sense) to lie all they want, though if they want continued political support it's probably a poor strategy. Before we are too quick to call on the law to support our side, consider what happens when that same law is used against us by our opponents. Right now you may want DNC leaders in jail, but I think it would set a terrible precedent for private political activities to result in imprisonment, regardless of our distaste for them. Again, the situation is very different when peoples' Constitutional voting rights are denied (eg, voting in a real election). Then by all means, legal action should be taken.
    - troyvit 10y ago
      I skimmed the beginning and end of 95 page report, but its recommendations were pretty good: 1) Exclusive use of hand-counted paper ballots in all future US elections. 2) Automatic voter registration, with same-day party affiliation switching as a mandatory condition for all elections that are publicly funded. 3) Restoration of voting rights legislation which would ensure adequate access to polling sites. So it's cool: no jail time for anybody, just better preventative measures.
harryh 10y ago
I think that OPs point was that previously reports like this would have been met with a "Well duh. Of course that is what happens. Primaries aren't fair elections." Where as now we are starting to see reports like this be taken seriously because there is a background expectation that primaries are conducted fairly. There is certainly acknowledgement that the current system isn't entirely fair. The change is that an strong desire for fairness now exists where previously it did not.
troyvit 10y ago
Yeah both these things are true. A lot of comments in this thread are about how an expectation of fairness at the party level is too much to ask for, and that's fine, but fraud and voter suppression are a whole different level. If it's happening here it's going to happen in the general election too. Waxing political I wonder if Trump will be able to build an infrastructure to hack/disenfranchise as many people as Clinton will since he's not as firmly inserted into the political machine. In other words elections of the future won't be settled by how many votes a candidate wins but by how many votes a candidate steals. Gives a whole new meaning to "Candidate A has locked in the [insert demographic here] vote."

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

brudgers 10y ago

To me there is an unquestioned premise to the article: why should the state [as in "government"] conduct elections on behalf of political parties. Enrolling voters as Democrat or Republican or whatever and then restricting the voter's access to ballot items based upon that enrollment [or non-enrollment] does not seem to be the business of the government. A political party is free to change the rules for nominating candidates however and whenever it chooses. It is free to nullify the decision of those voting in a particular primary. A political party is free to nominate whomever it chooses [and almost certainly multiple candidates for the same office it wishes should it choose]. Ultimately the party, not a judge, chooses whose vote matters and whose doesn't. Placing the imprimatur of the state upon a political party's process doesn't change that or make the process of candidate nomination little 'd' democratic. The people within a political party charged with making the rules for candidate selection are not elected or selected little 'd' democratically. The process of nominating candidates is not little 'd' democratic in any meaningful sense.

maxerickson 10y ago
A political party is free to change the rules for nominating candidates however and whenever it chooses. This is something we should take away from them. The outcomes of private party activities shouldn't have any impact on the names that appear on ballots. They can maybe mark the names they choose to endorse as an organization, but we should throw away the system where the parties are directly involved in putting names on the ballot (of course they'd be indirectly involved, as an organized group is, uh, organized and thus more ready to act together, so would have an easy time dealing with ballot petitions).
- white-flame 10y ago
  There are many barriers to entry to get a name on the ballot, and political parties will rally together to help jump through those hoops to get specific names on. If there were lower barriers to entry, the ballots would be flooded. I think the barriers to entry should likely remain high, but we need an overhaul of the voting system itself to break the two-party system, which itself is just a side-effect of the mechanics of our voting process, not anything mandated. If I remember correctly, early on in the country's history the founders noticed that the mechanics of voting were trending towards a limited two-party system, and that consternated them. Most every (if not actually every) democracy established after the USA has a voting style and representative bodies that allows more parties to coexist, or creative destruction within the set of active parties to thrive.

Ericson2314 10y ago

I'm sympathetic, but without a parliamentary system the US cannot have an effective market of political parties. And without such a market, primaries need to be democratic.

xenophonf 10y ago
I'm not sure a parliamentary system is necessary. Instead, I think we need to make three reforms: - non-partisan redistricting - instant runoff voting - automatic voter registration
- Ericson2314 10y ago
  Is instant runoff like ranked choice?

r_smart 10y ago

Interesting. My take on it is that most people have never paid much attention to the details how candidates are chosen and know they're going to vote with their party anyway or will wait until November to decide on their 'lesser of two evils'. They just never knew how it worked, and probably never expected a voice in the matter. I certainly never paid much attention to this stuff. I would sometimes follow primary candidates and maybe watch a debate or two, but all this stuff about delegates and super delegates etc. was not a thing until this year. This feels like it is quite possibly the longest span a presidential election has held the attention of the voting public. And we've still got quite some time to go.

vannevar 10y ago
I think this is right. We don't notice when things run smoothly, only when they go awry. Of course, if you want dramatic political change, "running smoothly" isn't what you're looking for. This nomination was unusual because: a) the nominee in this case wasn't the President or VP, which usually dampens any rival campaign before it gets started; b) the nominee was nonetheless more or less widely regarded as "next in line" in a way usually reserved for the VP; c) the nominee had unusually high negatives; and d) an Independent 'crashed' the Democratic party, bringing a lot of non-party voters with no vested interest in the existing party hierarchy. Had any one of these conditions been different, I don't think we would've seen the same degree of discord.

jswny 10y ago

I don't really understand the outrage. The parties are not part of the government, they aren't held to the same requirements for fairness. The caucuses of the parties are supposed to help them gauge the public perception of their candidates, to help them make a better decision as to which candidate is most likely to win the presidential election. In fact, I expect each party to be biased towards a certain candidate. I expect the party to come together to back the strongest candidate to prevent any possible party fractures. Just look at what happened this time, maybe if the Democrats had gone full-force behind Clinton from the beginning Sanders wouldn't have supporters protesting outside the convention for his very party. Maybe I'm wrong here but I never expected either party to go above and beyond what's required of them and act like they are part of the government.

Miner49er 10y ago
They do receive funding from the government though, which comes from taxpayers. Also, the DNC's rules specifically ban bias towards a candidate in the primaries.
alasdair_ 10y ago
One obvious issue is that taxpayers money goes to holding these elections. This seems ridiculous.
DamienSF 10y ago
Election officials still need to respect election law and the National Voters Right Act which hasn't been the case in many instances according to the report.