Tag Archives: elections

How to Fix the Nomination Process

Whether you are a Trump supporter, Cruz supporter, Kasich supporter, Sanders supporter, Hillary supporter, or a disinterested observer fed up with the whole thing like myself, we can all agree that the nomination process is a complete disaster. Not that any of this is new to this particular election; the 2016 campaign has only exposed the flaws in the process that have existed since the earliest days of the leading political parties.

No, neither Trump nor Sanders are having the nomination ‘stolen’ from them, at least not in a sense where actual ‘cheating’ is happening (best I can tell from afar anyway). The fact that Trump doesn’t understand how the process works does not mean Cruz is doing something wrong. And the irony of ironies where some of Sanders’s delegates are being redistributed…well, Hillary Clinton would never cheat right?

If the argument is that the game is rigged at worst or just a little screwy at best then I can certainly agree with that. The rules and process as was set up long before the 2016 campaign is really what is causing confusion leaving many primary voters angry and disillusioned. While it may be too late to cure what ails the nomination process for 2016, I believe I have a few ideas that would vastly improve the process and I would encourage any political party to at least give this a try.

A National Primary Day

This incredibly long drawn out byzantine primary system has outlived its usefulness. There is no reason to have a few states vote early while other vote later. If it’s good enough to have the general election on one day than the primary should be no different. My proposal is to have every state and territory vote on the same day, say 40-60 days before the party’s convention. If the states want to follow roughly the same calendar as the traditional primaries holding town halls, debates, or even non-binding straw polls then by all means, do so. The days of a handful of states determining who emerges should be done away with forever.

Allocation of Delegates

In the 2016 South Carolina Primary Donald Trump “won” the election with a whopping 32.5% of the vote. To put this another way, 67.5% of South Carolina voters voted for someone other than Donald Trump *but* because South Carolina is winner take all, Trump will be awarded all 50 of the state’s delegates! While I’m not one of these people who think that “majority rule” is a good thing in and of itself (actually it’s often terrible), it seems that in a primary or caucus which purports to reflect the “will of the people” should at a minimum, require that the winning candidate actually earned the majority of the vote.

If the goal of the nomination process is to nominate an individual who represents the “will of the people” in the party then the parties are not doing a very good job in achieving that goal. My proposal to improve this aspect of the process is as follows:

Each state/territory is to have one delegate for each congressional district and two at large delegates. Each would-be delegate is bound to a particular candidate and can only become a delegate if his/her candidate wins 50%+1 of the vote in the congressional district or, in the case of the at large would-be delegates, 50%+1 of the entire state, commonwealth, or territory. The candidates would keep every delegate s/he won (i.e. no winner take all states). The 50%+1 threshold would be easily achieved by implementing instant runoff voting (this is key). This way every vote actually would matter and the “spoiler effect” would be minimized if not eliminated.

Rather than explain how instant runoff voting (a.k.a. alternative voting) works for those who are not familiar, here’s a short video:

The Nominating Convention

The convention would operate more or less like it does now. The delegates would then go about choosing the nominee by either multiple rounds of voting or using the instant runoff method as described above. Because all the delegates would be bound to their candidate (at least to start with) in the former method s/he must vote for the candidate in the first round, in the latter s/he must rank the bound candidate #1 and the candidate of his or her choice for #2, #3, and so on. Whichever way the convention decided to go, the important thing is no winner would be selected without a majority recorded vote (i.e. no voice votes where the Chairperson decides which way the vote went based on his/her opinion).

Oh yeah, one other thing: no other candidates could be nominated who was not running on National Primary Day.

Would this process be perfect? Of course not. There is no system I can think of which will prevent a truly terrible person from being nominated or even elected. If there’s a better way, I would certainly would love to hear it. That being said, I believe this process is much superior than the one either party is using now.

All this makes me wonder though: if the parties are having this much trouble determining the will of the majority of their party members (assuming that’s really what they are trying to do), how can they be trusted to solve the more complex problems they want us to believe they can solve?
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One Point of Clarification

If you read carefully, you will notice that everything I wrote is just a suggestion about how any political party can improve its nomination process. None of this in any way is meant to advocate that the law should be changed to comply with my opinion. Its free advice and the parties can take it or leave it (and they probably will leave it…who am I to advise them right?).

I’ve come across some individuals who are upset about how some state parties have gone about choosing delegates (which I can sympathize with; I hate how the Colorado Republican Party chooses delegates). What everyone needs to understand though is that regardless of what they think they know about how the system works, the U.S. is not a democracy. It never was and never was intended to be. Some misguided individuals believe that the shenanigans (as they see it anyway) taking place in some of these state conventions is tantamount to treason against the U.S. Constitution.

For those who think this way, I’m about to drop a giant atomic truth bomb so here it goes…

There is no constitutional right for the average citizen to vote in a presidential election (neither in the party primaries nor in the general election). No, really there’s not.

For those who don’t believe me, the part of the U.S. Constitution that addresses how the POTUS is to be elected is located in Article II, Section 1, Paragraphs 2 through 4. I’ll share the most relevant part (paragraph 2):

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

As stated from the excerpt above, each state determines how Electors are picked to vote for POTUS. This means that if the state legislature wants to choose Electors by drawing names out of a hat or by roshambo, the state legislature may do so. As it happens, every state legislature has decided that the people have a right to vote for the Electors provided they are eligible to vote (as determined by that state’s laws).

Did you notice something else? What about all the explaining about the nomination process of delegates of a particular political party?

Read the excerpt again, no actually read Article II in its entirety because I know some people reading this think that I cherry picked one small part from the U.S. Constitution to make my point.

Did you notice that there wasn’t a single word about political parties, much less how they go about choosing a nominee for president?

Themoreyouknow

Kimberly Guilfoyle’s Rant Against Millennials Was Not About Millennials

I saw popping up in my Facebook feed a discussion on Kevin’s Facebook regarding the comments that Fox News’ Kimberly Guilfoyle made during a forum on what Democrats offer young women, a typically liberal voting bloc. Her controversial comments noted that she believed “millennial” women (and men, as she later clarified on Twitter) should stay out of the voting box and “go back to Tinder and Match.com”.

I was left with a pressing question… what the hell is “Tinder”? After doing some research, I found it was like a GPS-based Hot or Not. Kind of creepy if you ask me, but I wish it was this easy to get laid when I was in my 20s. There were no free sex dating sites or apps like Tinder back then! After my research, I instantly dismissed the initial comments. After all, if I wanted to get emotional any time a Fox host said something stupid, I’d be writing for Media Matters instead of The Liberty Papers. But the discussion on Kevin’s page – largely involving younger conservative women, many of whom were critical of the remarks themselves – gave me an epiphany regarding “millennials”.

I remember when I was a teenager – I’m 34 – everyone was making a big deal out of Generation X. We were these new breed of teenagers, and we were Everything Wrong With Americaâ„¢: we were uncouth, undisciplined, and uncontrollable. We were, in short, animals who were going to destroy America, said a generation of Americans who, before we were born, engaged in free love, did LSD by the bucket, and wore bell-bottom pants. The new generation isn’t so different, they just have the technology, like these hook-up apps (click here), that means they can do free lovin’ better than we ever could!

All I'm saying is, anyone who willingly puts on these clothes probably shouldn't be yelling too hard because they found a pack of fags in their kids' dresser.

All I’m saying is, anyone who willingly puts on these clothes probably shouldn’t be yelling too hard because they found a pack of cigarettes in their kids’ dresser.

That generation of children that slammed my own generation – the Woodstock generation – was rebelling against their own conservative parents, who… wait, wasn’t Rock and Roll music going to destroy America, too? That Elvis Presley and his gyrating hips and oh my goodness are those black singers on my radio!? Help a young buck out. This is a conservative site, I know my readers here are old enough to remember.

I don’t know if their parents had anything that was Destroying Americaâ„¢ – between the Great Depression and World War II, they seem like they were too busy not dying to worry about how Jazz music was affecting our future – but there’s a history, through multiple generations of kids being dumb, getting older, becoming comparatively less dumb, and then railing at the dumbness of their own children. Add in a few hack journalists – old people, what did we call “clickbait” in the 80s? – and it’s always a case of The Youth Destroying America.

We’re no different. Many of my associates from my youth, possessed with a combination of strong libido, poor impulse control and even poorer sex education, have had children who are now either in or approaching their teens, and many of these people naturally rail against what children and millennials have become, forgetting that in many cases, they were even dumber when they were that age.

Where this ties into Guilfoyle’s comments is that I don’t necessarily think this is a consequence of ageing. I don’t think people just automatically go from being dumb to being smart as they get older. The only difference is how their vapid, narrow-minded worldview affects arbitrary political views, and who that happens to align with at the time. Voters aren’t absent-minded because they’re young, or because they vote for one side or the other; it’s an issue that stretches across all ages.

Poorly educated younger voters – who don’t read the news, don’t consider alternative worldviews, and generally only care whose bed they’re going to spend the night in – tend to vote liberal for many narrow reasons, but for simplicity’s sake, we’ll boil it down to “screw the man”. They support Operation Wall Street, favour income redistribution, are against the drug war and support higher property taxes because it boils down to more for them, less for everyone else. Forget nuance. Forget learning the issues. Damnit, the world is burning, and they don’t have time for that shit!

Eventually, those kids will get older, and get married and have kids of their own. Now, with the burden of that higher tax on their shoulders, and scared for their children, they slam into the other extreme. Ban all drugs! Put away criminals! Lower taxes! End social safety nets! Lock up potential predators (even if guilty of nothing more than thought crimes)! All because If It Only Saves One Child!â„¢ Forget nuance. Forget learning the issues. Damnit, Timmy has to get to football practice, and they don’t have time for that shit!

Soon, my generation, like those behind us, will get old. Now, the same people who railed for school spending in their 20s will want to pull it back. What do they care? Their kids are graduated. Instead, it will be about protecting their social security, their Medicare, and their freedom, no matter how poor their understanding of that word is. People who couldn’t stop putting drugs into their bodies as youths will continue to rail against those that do so now, because it’s their property that could be TP’d as some youth’s prank. Forget nuance. Forget learning the issues. Damnit, they’re old, they’re running out of time for that shit!

Low information voters go across generations, and across virtually any boundary one can think of, be it race, gender, age, income, etc., and despite the protests from people who usually are older, the margins are far thinner than people think. The difference is that we’re willing to tolerate the idiots who happen to align their views with our own. When Kim Guilfoyle slams millennial women, she’s not slamming a generation – young Republican voters are surely her equivalent to how a racist refers to his Black Friend – she’s slamming people who vote Democrat. Likewise, young people are more willing to tolerate Occupy, no matter how noxious it gets, because old people don’t get it, despite the many, many of them that actually do, if anyone took the time to talk to someone instead of yelling at them.

The kind of voters who don’t read, don’t learn, and ultimately just fumble their way through life, and still vote in who gets to run the country, are an issue and a problem that needs to be dealt with, no matter the political persuasion. Our democracy is a chain, and that chain is as strong as its weakest link. Whether that link is concerned about getting laid on… uh, that get laid app thingy… or is foolishly buying gold coins because someone on TV told them the economy was going to crash, is irrelevant.

Christopher Bowen covered the video games industry for eight years before moving onto politics and general interest. He is the Editor in Chief of Gaming Bus, and has worked for Diehard GameFan, Daily Games News, TalkingAboutGames.com and has freelanced elsewhere. He is a “liberaltarian” – a liberal libertarian. A network engineer by trade, he lives in Derby CT.