Rolling Stone: The Way America Picks Presidential Nominees Is Dumb

[Lodestar]

The U.S. has a primary system that prioritizes parties ahead of voters

The South Carolina and Nevada primaries are approaching and Super Tuesday — so named during the U.S. bicentennial year to make the party primary process sound like a meritocratic sporting event — looms. At this point in the election season, it seems we can draw at least one conclusion: The major party primaries are the biggest scam foisted on American democracy since the founders cooked up the Electoral College.

The primaries cement the importance of the two major political parties in the American system. This importance is unearned and, aside from the right of assembly, has no place in the U.S. Constitution. The idea that the most qualified or effective president and federal representatives would be those chosen by either the Democrats or Republicans to go head-to-head in the general election is a sham. Democrats and Republicans may have dramatic differences, but they have colluded to bamboozle the country. The primary process is Byzantine, undemocratic, un-American and ineffective.

The biggest problem with the primary system is that it prioritizes parties ahead of voters. In a Boston Globe explainer, Evan Horowitz laments that primary voters don't even have real authority to choose their party nominees. "Voters have no constitutional right to decide the winner." Which is true, but misses the larger point, which is that the Constitution spells out no roles for parties to be involved in the first place.

A political party is nothing more than a private club with exceedingly low standards for entry. It's harder for an unskilled practitioner to join a bowling league than it is for a vegan communist to join the GOP in cattle country.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-way-america-picks-presidential-nominees-is-dumb-20160216#ixzz40MwMHDEM

[nichomachus]

1. It makes perfect sense

It goes along with our chaotic health-care system, our degenerating education system, our failing infrastructure, our corrupt Congress and courts -- and our bloated military, which hasn't won a war since forever.

[Igel]

2. Candidates are free to run outside of parties.

However, that's harder since parties have an apparatus for collecting money, getting out the vote, and have proven large enough that they work with states to put on primaries.

One is also completely free to found a new party. There are numerous. In my day I've voted for candidates from parties left and right, from (D) to (R) to (L) to (G) and parties in California whose name I wouldn't recognize if you paid me. It depended on their stands on particular issues that they'd actually have some say over that were important to me at the time, not what their stands on matters outside their bailiwick were or their stands on things long past that were set in stone. That might be county assessor or president, a local judge or a state senator.