According to a recent Reuters poll, approximately half of Americans think the presidential nominating system is rigged. The use of delegates to override popular vote seems undemocratic to many, and it's hard to trust that it's being handled fairly. The use of superdelegates in the Democratic party seems especially undemocratic, making it feel almost totally pointless to vote in a primary election.
Closed primaries are one of the worst parts of the whole process. Is it really fair to block millions of unaffiliated citizens from voting? Should parties have that much power? I understand that the primary elections are to decide who will be a party's candidate for president, but I don't believe that any citizen of this country should be barred from voting for someone because of lack of party affiliation. Many voters in New York recently claimed that their party affiliation had mysteriously been switched to "unaffiliated" or "independent" without their knowledge or consent, making it impossible for them to vote. It seems ridiculous to me that allegiance to one of the two major parties gets to determine whether or not you are allowed to do one of the most iconically democratic acts of this country which everyone loves to preach about.
It seems that most agree that our election system is quite broken, if not awfully corrupt. This is not a particularly new argument either. I think we should either get rid of closed primaries and the use of delegates, or throw away the whole party system altogether. It isn't fair, it isn't democratic, and it is too easy to give money and power the loudest voice. If nothing is done to change the process, we should at the very least give up on this pretense that we live in any kind of real democracy, the term that so many in this country love to tout.
1 comment:
Although our country is not purely a democracy, rather a democratic republic, I agree with the idea of maintaining this country’s election process as democratic as possible. Having the people heard is a fundamental aspect that helped shape this country from the very beginning and by setting up roadblocks that prevent the voice of the nation from being heard, then we are backtracking as a country. In the case of political parties manipulating voter eligibility to control poll outcomes, we see what one of this country's founding fathers feared as he left office, which was the idea that political factions would ultimately harm the United States. George Washington, the founding father that I am referring to, warned in his famous Farewell Address that political parties would “subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government,” which is exactly what appears to be happening when voters are denied to practice their right to vote because they were unknowingly labeled as “unaffiliated” or “independent” in their party affiliation status. It is sad seeing that many are losing faith in this political system that we have in place now and I, once again, agree that there is definitely changes that need to happen in order to restore that faith. We’ll just have to see what the future holds for this nation.
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