Drudge is headlining his Colorado story with this picture. FURY AS COLORADO HAS NO PRIMARY OR CAUCUS; CRUZ CELEBRATES VOTERLESS VICTORY Iraq women get to choose their leaders. Colorado Republicans - well, not anymore. It's just too inconvenient for the party elites. The Denver Post says the GOP blundered. In fact, they call it "mind boggling." People are burning their party registrations. A lot of Trump supporters are likewise furious that the ballots omitted Trump delegates and included Cruz delegates twice, with cries that the system was once again rigged by Lyin' Ted. And of course Cruz is crowing about his victory and his supporters are bragging that they're just better at knowing the rules, which outrages non-Cruz supporters even more. Pretty much any conservative media outlet has a major war going on in the comment sections.
Apparently, there where a number of last minute changes made to the process specifically designed to help Cruz and hurt Trump. Yes, you can legitimately say the GOP elites are outright cheating but no one should be surprised as they have been doing the same with voter suppression for years plus Cryz has a long histpry of dirty tricks.
DWS must be green with envy as she got pummelled and will likely lose her seat for her dirty tricks to help Hillary yet her underhandedness wasn't nearly as blatant.
Real Clear Politics Former CO GOP Chair: Message We're Sending Is "Your Vote Doesn't Matter And Your Voice Doesn't Count"
Well, it's unfortunate but is there really any pretense that internal party workings have to be democratic? There are lots more things to complain about if that's the standard.
What it indicates is that the Republican party leadership is actively alienating a lot of the rank-and-file. That's going to be bad for them in November.
Where are the Dems to scream about voter disenfranchisement? Or does that only apply to minorities and voter ID laws?
Judging from various comment sections, a lot of strong Republicans are going to vote the straight D ticket in disgust.
Can someone help me out and explain how this happened? For once, no source I could find is intelligible to this furriner.
The short answer is that the Republican party leadership is contemplating a Donald Trump nomination and (pardon my French) losing their fuckin' minds at the possibility. So they're short-circuiting their own nomination process to try to make sure Trump isn't the nominee.
This is the thing that people don't seem to understand. Political parties are membership organizations that can and do set their own rules. The idea that they should be forced to behave in a certain way because two people who aren't a member (Sanders) or only recently joined (Trump) don't like the result is idiotic. Much greater threats to democracy in American elections are the electoral college and first past the post system.
Ah, but it's also trivially easy to destroy a political party because without the support of massive number of voters, a political party is just an obscure social club. Constitutionally, parties don't officially exist. They are just clubs devoted to trying to get a good nominee on the ballot. Election laws accommodate them because election laws are written by people who've won elections, almost all of whom won with the backing of a party. But if the party pulls too many insider tricks, or slams the door on the will of the voters, those voters will "disemploy" it by voting it out of office until its official are forced to seek honest work elsewhere.
Very true. So the reform we need is in election law. Both the issues I've raised, and ballot access as you've noted, jointly conspire to favor existing political parties. We can reform much of this via state voter initiatives. But to expect the parties to not control their own processes is a bit naive.
Sometimes it takes a while for a horrible decision to bite you in the ass. In this case it did, and was made far worse by knocking Trump delegates off the ballot. One Trump delegate, a very prominent GOP insider, showed up to find he'd been entirely dropped from the list. The party blamed "paperwork". Every such accidental screw up somehow seems to work in Cruz's favor, and to make things worse, Cruz supporters are flooding the comment threads to brag about it. This is convincing anyone who doesn't support Cruz that Cruz is a sleazeball who rigs elections. Other commenters are noting that Republican elections are now about as valid as elections under Stalin. The amount of outrage keeps building, and further Cruz victories will just feed it. If the GOP establishment succeeds in stopping Trump they'll likely do what looked mathematically impossible based on the relative turnout through the March primaries - they'll lose the general because too many Trump supporters will change sides or not vote. The question is what percentage of the 35 percent of Republican primary voters who voted for Trump will do that, and what percentage of those who didn't vote for Cruz will do that.
The problem isn't controlling the process, it's losing their minds and pursuing an "at all costs" strategy that makes them pull big, obvious levers that makes a huge swath of their supporters say "That's not controlling, that's rigging." The civil war within the party is going to get even worse once Trump doesn't win in the first round, when Cruz's delegates go to war with the GOP establishment. The establishment can't actually nominate Cruz because just as Huckabee, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum, and Donald Trump said, he's constitutionally ineligible under Article II. (No Cruz supporter at NRO or elsewhere has yet won that debate, they just pound their sippy cups and holler "birther!", or express a complete misunderstanding of the 1790 Naturalization Act for the hundredth time). The establishment no doubt started this campaign thinking there would be a handful of Cruz supporters who they'd "disenfranchise" at the convention, with the delegates switching to Jeb. But now there's going to be an army of Cruz delegates and they won't take no for an answer. So the convention will be full of extremely angry Trump supporters and extremely angry Cruz supporters, both at war with the establishment and each other. Nothing better illustrates the utter incompetence of the GOP establishment than that they presided over this, and did everything they could to bring this about.
True, but if they're going to insist on this, they should give up the right to have their nomination processes be taxpayer-subsidized.
Members are members no matter how long they are members and if they are going to get taxpayers to subsidize their operation then it needa to be transparent and above board.
No argument. The entire process is a farce, the way we treat parties as a quasi-official element of electoral process. But fundamentally, that's not a party problem, it's an election law problem. I don't care what the parties do. I care very much that we make it so difficult to participate without the backing of a party.
As I've said three times now, that's a problem with our election laws, not how the parties themselves operate.
Yeah, but the election laws are written by the same elite members who constantly change things to their advantage. So the issues are linked.
Agreed, but to focus on party is the wrong strategy. Private clubs set their own procedures. We need voter initiatives in every state supporting reforms like instant run-off and the National Popular Vote interstate compact. We can't break the two party system by violating their rights as assemblies of private citizens. It's a waste of time to even try that approach.
I'm not sure about that. Probably not. For that matter, there could be primary states where the parties reimburse the state for election costs. I don't actually mind primaries being publicly funded, as long as (a) they're open primaries, and (b) any party that wants to use them for their nominating process is allowed to.
As more states go to various touch screen voting systems, the additional cost of adding just about anything to a primary ballot should become almost nil, and not much different than the cost of making a change to a web-page. Since every state already has primaries of some sort, just bundle everything in. Kentucky had a Republican caucus for the first time this year, but we'll also have our usual primary where we'll select candidates for all the state and local offices. Normally we'd vote on a Presidential nominee during the primary, but they shifted to a caucus so we could weigh in earlier. The Constitution perhaps gives states too much power regarding elections, but of course the Constitution had to be approved by state level people who had already "navigated the system" in whatever state they were from, and thus were favored by that system. There wasn't much hope that they would change how their own power structure worked to keep them in office.
No, highlighting the absolute undemocratic nature of the status quo is exactly what needs to happen. We can continue with your other suggestions from there but first reality needs to be acknowledged.
