WAPO says “It’s Time to Give the Elites a Bigger Say in Choosing the President”

As If They Did Not Have Enough!

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You would think the Washington Post, despite being owned by Amazon and Bezos, would be a little more subtle about their loyalty to the oligarchy. While in the middle of writing this piece, Wapo changed the headline to instead read, “It’s time to switch to preference primaries”. But articles have already been written on the blunder. And the URL of the WAPO article can’t be changed without unpublishing, which reads “fix-primaries-let-elites-decide” ... The article would introduce with the article saying the primary is off to a “rocky start” because of Bernie’s lead in the popular votes coinciding with Buttigieg’s lead in delegates.

“ Independent Bernie Sanders seems to be leading in popular votes, while upstart Pete Buttigieg is ahead in the delegate count. And there’s also the question of whether either one — or any of the other candidates — can bring the party together moving forward”

The author, Azari, doesn’t even mention the Iowa debacle, nor the other instances of potential corruption that could be responsible for Bernie's popular vote vs. delegate count being neck-and-neck. After all, WAPO is owned by Amazon who has a 600 million dollar contract with the CIA. It would be a conflict of interest to deny the legitimacy of CIA Pete’s delegate count. The Onion does not even have to alter WAPO’s unironically published headline to make fun of it -they could just retweet it. Maybe they could try “It’s Time to Give the Elites a Bigger Say in Choosing the President Since Bernie Sanders is Winning the Popular Vote”.

One of the more mask off headlines I’ve seen in awhile pic.twitter.com/CwlDXikoDG

Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) February 19, 2020

WAPO’s opinion piece would acknowledge that the current electoral process is “clearly flawed”, although failing to properly recognize just how its flawed, before prompting, “What would make it better?”. Now, you might be curious what answer Azari provided to that question. Here goes. Brace yourself.

“Finding an answer means thinking about the purpose of presidential nominations, and about how the existing system falls short. It will require swimming against the tide of how we’ve thought about nominations for decades — as a contest between everyday voters and elites, or as a smaller version of a general election. A better primary system would empower elites to bargain and make decisions, instructed by voters."

So as populism is just starting to actually take off, the population should forget the notion that nominations are a tug of war between the elite and the everyday voter, and instead trust the elite’s delegates to properly interpret the voter’s wishes and pick a candidate based on these delegates fallible interpretations of which candidate is best suited to represent their constituency......yeah....right. This will already make the democratic party’s very undemocratic system even more undemocratic.

While the article promotes the idea of “preference nomination” which has some positive elements to it, but with the subjective delegates involved, the process would take electoral control from the constituency and give it to the elite and their delegates, increasing the susceptibility for a popular candidate to have their nomination hijacked by delegates.

Wapo does not want us to think that like that though. In Newspeak, Azari explain’s that,
“The kinds of processes that we associate with more open and high-quality democracy may not actually help parties produce nominees that really reflect the party’s overall concerns”. Azari does not distinguish between “the party”- whose concerns apparently the nominee is supposed to reflect - and the constituency of the party. Who is deciding “the party’s overall concerns”? While the article wishes to implicate the idea that preference primaries will allow voters to better voice their concerns, and have them heard, it doesn’t address the interpretive room for error of delegates and the expanded ability for the popular vote to be neglected because of this

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Ranked choice

Ranked Choice is another electoral reform being proposed, and one could argue that this proposition of “preference primaries” is a way to undermine positive reform proposals and pull the discussion in the wrong direction. Perhaps the atrocious headline was a magnificent freudian slip instead of a not-so-subtle flex by the oligarchy (although this is very possible as well). In the spirit of focusing on finding solutions as much as identifying problems, it is worth noting that In contrast to preference primaries, ranked choice would give more power and flexibility to the constituency rather than the delegates.

As Time explained ranked choice,

“The candidate with the majority (more than 50%) of first-choice votes wins outright. If no candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, then it triggers a new counting process. The candidate who did the worst is eliminated, and that candidate’s voters’ ballots are redistributed to their second-choice pick. In other words, if you ranked a losing candidate as your first choice, and the candidate is eliminated, then your vote still counts: it just moves to your second-choice candidate. That process continues until there is a candidate who has the majority of votes.”

This helps counter whats known as the “spoiler” effect of the current plurality system which “doesn’t always reflect the true will of the people. It can lead to vote-splitting among candidates with similar positions, resulting in a candidate who is less popular overall being elected, experts say.”

If ranked choice was initiated, voter shaming based on the viability of a candidate would go out the window. “Underdog” candidates who have a unique platform would be better incentivized to run. Constituents would be more likely to vote for them knowing that they are not sacrificing a vote for their 2nd choice - unless some other candidate achieved greater than 50% of the total electorate’s pick of first choice, which is already highly unlikely in the plurality system, and would be even more so under these reforms.

When discussing electoral reform at a Town Hall in New Hampshire, where Gabbard officially endorsed ranked choice(~28:00 September 6th), Gabbard would talk about the summit, “Unrig”, which happened in 2018 where she had first encountered a group of people lobbying for ranked choice.

Gabbard: “I hadn’t really heard much about it, and so I had to educate myself - and have been really interested and encouraged by the growing support for this on the local level, but really see how it makes sense and could have such an impact at the national level. And really just being in a place where we as voters, we are able to vote for who we want to vote.”
Larry Lessig:-“Yeah without worrying about about 'are you throwing your votes away' ”-
Gabbard: “Exactly, which by the way was the issue in 2016, right, well you gotta vote for who you think can win and who can beat the other guy rather than voting for who you think the best candidate is.”

It is worth noting that Tulsi Gabbard has endorsed ranked choice along with a variety of other voter reform measures that could drastically improve voter turnout and enfranchisement. These reform propositions are important to take in consideration when looking for ways to improve our democracy and take power and influence from the elite and give it back to the citizenry. Descriptions of these proposals can be found here and here. These measures include

• Open Primaries.
• Make Election Day a Federal Holiday
• Paper Ballot - Which inspired her introduction of the Securing America’s Elections Act to the House.
• Automatic Voter Registration.
• Same-day Registration
• Repeal discriminatory voter ID laws and other voter suppression policies