A Report on the Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries

Does any other country have a 'primary' system like the US? In Australia there is no pretending to elect candidates for each party. In our recent election we had two choices for PM from the major parties, chosen by the parties themselves.

In the US you spent a year choosing your candidates, but behind closed doors one of those parties spent all their time trying to push one candidate whilst the other party spent all their time trying to stop another.

The Australian system seems a little more honest, even though the roles of PM and President are quite different. We can elect a PM and the party can then choose to throw them out the week after. This happens frequently.

In the Netherlands a parties candidates are up to the parties themselves, who usually put them up for internal elections. For the bigger parties, these elections are often newsworthy. Some parties experiment by taking suggestions from the outside or even allowing outsiders to vote as well. I don't think the 'primary' system in the US is very special; it is highly newsworthy though.

More than a year, even. And a first-term president is distracted for the last year of their term with that politicking.

Regardless of the pros and cons of the US system, it does seem weird that Mr Head Honcho can end up not being politically aligned with the legislature. So much potential for stalemate, as evidenced by the past six years.

Australia has a system like this now in the Labor party, I believe the UK does too.

Shorten was elected as the Labor party leader by a combined vote of the parliamentary party and party members.

The major Canadian political parties hold leadership elections open to party members (indirectly through convention delegates mostly). Party membership is entirely a private undertaking, and generally just requires a small financial contribution and a promise that you don't already belong to another party.

I think the Australian system is broken in a different way.

As a fun exercise - review the AU constitution and find all the references to the role of PM.

Sean Kelly writing in TheMonthly(.com.au) recently observed after the last election:

"It’s a mistake to think that there is such a thing as the national will or the voice of the people that is somehow expressed through the electoral process, or that an election result can be construed strictly as approval or disapproval of a set of policies. People vote in all sorts of ways for all sorts of reasons – personal benefit, an attempt at dispassionate policy assessment, preference for individual politicians, habit – and the number of votes that decide any given election is always a small fraction of the population.

"If there’s one thing this election result has told us, it’s that the appeal of both major parties is still on the decline. Twenty-five percent of voters put neither Liberal nor Labor first; yet collectively they are only represented by 3% of the lower house and perhaps 11% of the senate. (Whether it makes sense to think of them collectively is a separate question.) That’s a quarter of the country who look at parliament and don’t see themselves represented."

From a purely leadership POV, US and AU have the same problem that >50% of people don't want the leader that they have - due primarily to the fixation of a) a single leadership role (bring back the triumvirates! :) and b) two-party politics.

When you're informed you only have two choices - you're probably not in a democracy.

It's a bit strange to think of representation only if your candidate wins. By that definition representatives (PMs, members of the house, house reps, whatever they're called) would stop being representative the moment someone loses against them. And there are a lot of contested electoral districts. (Sadly there are quite a few uncontested ones too.)

The quality of representation is a different matter. But yes, (representative) democracy is broken. Just as any collective policy making strategy that requires an expert majority.

Usually parties have a documented and sort of transparent-ish process, that they undertake, and eventually hold a very well publicized vote/election to elect the nominee.

So far this is exactly the primary process. The difference is that the US one is big. In time and space. It takes many months, and potential nominees know that they are in the race from the first moment, because they know that politics is a lot more about showing up, moving your voters, than being on the ballot. (See the NRA, Church of Scientology, and other religious groups.)

Australia works on a parliamentary system where parties elect their respective candidates directly. The US is a republic, where in theory any citizen should be able to run for the highest office with zero qualifications. Big difference.

The issue is that the representation in parliament is not proportional to the people. Proportional Repesentation solves this, at the cost of making politics more complex and mushy than just choosing between A and B. As a kid the spectacle of US elections (FPTP-ish) always fascinated me. Now I'm thankful for having a voting system that doesn't have a two-party system as only stable equilibrium.

The U.S., as a system of government, does not actually have a primary system. See if you can find it in the U.S. Constitution--I'll wait while you look.

> In our recent election we had two choices for PM from the major parties, chosen by the parties themselves.

This is what the U.S. has as well. The Democratic "primary" is a private process that is not required by the Constitution or federal law. It is set up and run by private citizens for the benefit of private citizens. It is how the Democratic party chooses its candidate, and it works however the Democratic party says it should work.

Participating in a primary is not like participating in a general election. There is no federal right to be considered for the Democratic candidate for president. There is no federal law that says the Democratic National Committee staff has to provide equitable treatment to any particular candidate or campaign. There is not even a federal requirement that a citizen be permitted to cast a vote at all in a primary.

I am hopeful that one of the results of all this hysteria and lawsuits right now is that the courts will help make that clear to people.

They don't have to participate in state-run primary elections, but if they choose to, they are not allowed to commit election fraud. Primary elections are still elections.

Of course, they don't have to provide equitable treatment to candidates in other ways.

How is a primary similar to a general election? No one is elected to anything in a primary. A primary results only in an advisory signal to a party nominating process, which is privately run. We just saw the Democratic one conclude tonight.

What is the state or federal government interest in how a private organization chooses to endorse a slate of candidates? Will we see lawsuits and government regulations over how the Sierra Club or NRA choose to endorse candidates? Will we see state officials stepping in to run or monitor caucuses or conventions if the state party decides to do that instead of a primary?

Just because a party primary has the same mechanics as a general election, that doesn't necessarily mean it has the same legal status--or that it should. In fact it's arguable that spending state resources to help a group of private citizens decide who to endorse is an example of straight-up corruption and waste of taxpayer money.