Bernie Sanders wants electoral reforms.
- Same-day voter registration
- Enough staffing and training to allow people to vote in a timely fashion
- Make sure the votes get counted
And then there's this one, which we'll quote directly.
- "We need real electoral reform within the Democratic Party. And that means — among many, many other things — open primaries. The idea that in the state of New York, the great state of New York, 3 million people could not participate in helping to select who the Democratic or Republican candidate for president would be because they had registered as an independent not as a Democrat or a Republican is incomprehensible.”
There’s no problem with the first three bullet points, though those are all based on state law and elections machinery. The Democratic Party has no control over them, which is why I now advocate for the party to wholly take over the primary process.
But the idea that it is “incomprehensible” that non-Democrats get to choose the Democratic nominee is, well, incomprehensible.
There is no point to a political party unless that party can decide for itself who represents it. It costs nothing to register as a Democrat (or Republican). No one even knows which party you register under. The only reason to register as an independent is because you think you are too good or pure or uncorrupted to be a member of a party. And if that’s the case? Good for you! We are all duly impressed. So shiny and perfect!
But fuck you, you don’t get to pick our candidates.
I don’t walk into a Shriners meeting, tell them they all suck and I hate their fez hats and cool stupid little parade cars, then demand a say in who leads the organization. That would be absurd and I’d be laughed out of the room. So why would anyone think differently about political parties? Yeah, I’m laughing Bernie’s idea out of the room.
You want a say in who a party nominates, join it. If you are too cool to join it, then you are too cool to have a say. Simple. Period. End of story.
Of course, Sanders’ list doesn’t include caucuses, which are an abomination of democracy and dramatically depressed turnout (and I wrote that piece before the Nebraska and Washington non-binding primaries, which had dramatically bigger turnout than the caucuses—even though they did not matter). I wonder why the guy who insisted on everyone voting would suddenly clamp down when discussing those undemocratic caucuses?
Or how about giving Iowa and New Hampshire their unearned and unrepresentative early-state duopoly in the process? Why is he quiet about that?
Or how about the unequal allocation of delegates? Sanders got more than 45.25 percent of the delegates even though he only got 43 percent of the popular vote. Why not fight for a delegate allocation system that matches the votes earned at the ballot box?
It’s hard to take anyone seriously when their prescription to fix a broken primary process is focused nearly exclusively on the things that hurt him, and completely glosses over and ignores the fucked up things that helped him.
The process is fucked and broken, but the solution doesn’t lie in a one-sided, biased assessment of what went wrong. It requires an honest top-to-bottom review, and Sanders didn’t offer that.
As for open primaries? Hell no. If you want a say, join the party.