Watching all the commentators discuss the delegate count for both primaries makes one realize that our electoral system is the most undemocratic mess that ever crawled out of a garbage pail in Kowloon. You combine the Democrats Supper delegate farce with the Republican voter ID mess, add them both to the concept of electing delegates that don’t have to vote the way that the voters who voted for them wanted them to, mix it all with the way we gerrymander voting districts and you are forced to admit that one man, one vote just doesn’t exist in the American primary elections and is damn weak in the general elections too.
So what do we actually have? We actually have a politically dishonest process that has evolved over the years into something that is governed by he concept that those in office set the rules that allow them to continue in office, forever. Those in office redraw electoral districts. Those in office set up rules about what kinds of ID are necessary to cast your ballot. Those rules are made to add or subtract those voters from the rolls that might not vote the way that those in power want them to.
Listening to the pundits trying to explain the rules that dictate who the elected delegate must vote for, and which delegates are free to vote for whom, is a comedic farce even to those who are supposed to know the rules and how those rules are applied. It is an exercise in mass futility.
Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans operate under any kind of democratic process. The rules by which they conduct the primaries would make a Middle East dictator blush. So where do we get off calling this a democracy? Well, we shouldn’t. Our process of electing leaders, has for decades, been rigged by crooked politicians for the benefit of themselves and their favorites. But there is something we can do about it. First we have to throw out all the party rules and conduct our primaries according to the same rules that we conduct our general elections with a few significant changes.
The most important of those changes is to get rid of the delegates and the Electoral College and vote directly for the candidates of our choice. The Electoral College is an anachronism. It no longer has any practical value. It still exists only to reward favored party members, or to allow for the manipulation of votes by the party leaders. The Electoral College was created to facilitate the forwarding of voting information at a time before the existence of any form of mass communication. We no longer depend of homing pigeons or the Pony Express to facilitate our communications. We should no longer depend on the Electoral College to pick our presidents. It is not only outmoded, it is very un-Democratic. We are the leading technological nation in the world. There is no reason for us to pick our President by an exchange of cave paintings.
Ed Cox, GOP chairman in NYS, was blabbering this weekend abut the rules of the Party and the convention when the fairness of a politician not getting elected, when he gets the most votes, came up. Cox is one of those sleazy pols who make a living contributing nothing and playing the party against the people. He is dumb enough to actually believe that our current electoral process is really democratic. It’s the murky nature of all party driven rules that allows slime like Cox to exist and help the party bosses control who gets elected.
A perfect example of what this argument is about was seen in Colorado this week, when Bernie Sanders won the election at ballot box but gained only seven delegates to Hillary Clinton’s eleven. How’s that for democracy? Or maybe the GOP in Colorado, where Cruz lost the election to Trump yet won the delegates who had all been chosen months ago before the candidates had even been selected. Of course this all happened in Colorado, home of the Koch’s, those bastions of the democratic process.
Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s new campaign manager was interviewed on Meet The Press today. Chuck Todd asked him a bunch of technical questions about the process of getting delegates over to your side. Neither of them seemed to notice that they were talking about a process that has nothing to do with the one man one vote model on which democracy is based. This is true of the pundits from both parties, who just automatically accept the fact that we are all participating in a process that has nothing to do with the democratic model. Basically if you are reading this you must understand that insiders rig our elections, and that your vote means almost nothing. That’s why we have such low voting totals. Plenty of people do understand this and don’t want to waste their time when their vote clearly doesn’t mean spit.
If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it twenty times on the tube this week. “It’s all according to the rules.” Sure, but whose rules? And who established those rules? Well, it turns out that the individual parties each established their own rules, none of which answers to any national democratic one man one vote model, only to the wants of the party leadership.
So how do we get rid of these rules and get back to a simple one man one vote model? Elect a President who sees the problem, understands the damage it does to the American electoral process and has the balls to change it once he or she gets in office. It’s interesting to note that only one of the current candidates has seen fit to complain about this mess and only because he thinks it is causing him to lose points in the election. I’m speaking, of course, about Donald Trump. Trump may be the ultimate sleaze and anyone with any brains understands that he wouldn’t be attacking the process if it favored him, but he is in fact right. Of course he thinks the current process is just hurting him when it is actually hurting everyone who has wasted his time voting. Trump is just too egomaniacal to understand this. The only person who counts in Trump’s world is Trump. Donald Trump’s idea of a democracy is one in which he is king and he gets to throw out anyone he doesn’t like or who doesn’t pay him enough homage.
That’s exactly the world we will eventually get if we continue down the road to which our current electoral process leads.