A Report on the Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries

I think the most interesting (and perhaps hopeful) aspect here is that people now have an expectation of fairness in the selection of party candidates. That's a relatively new phenomenon. In the past, I think people widely assumed that the party was biased towards individual candidates. Even now, that's clearly the case when the sitting President is a candidate. I personally think that expecting an unbiased party structure is unrealistic, given the very nature of the organization. The party doesn't have a product, other than its opinion. The idea that an organization of partisans only arrives at that collective opinion through primaries and caucuses seems quite naive to me.

I am not sure how the findings of this report can reinforce the expectation of fairness in the selection process. The reports points out to evidences of various election fraud tactics (voter suppression, registration tampering, illegal voter purging and fraudulent voting machine tallies) which have been carried out to eventually influence the outcome of the election.

Also, I wonder how can the Democratic party can still be credible in denouncing Republicans efforts to suppress voters the right to vote when employing the exact same tactics during the primaries.

I'd be cautious of this report. This is an American politics advocacy organization. Not to say that this report is incorrect per se, it may be 100% right. But it also may be anything else, ranging from wildly exaggerated to outright wrong. It's very difficult to find sober, factual information in the national American political scene.

I looked up one of the referenced incidents -- the botched poll in Arizona -- and based on other articles (see: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/31/ar...) it's hard to tell from a bird's eye perspective whether even that was "rigged".. or whether it was mere "incompetence".

I know FiveThirtyEight, referenced several times in the paper, (http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-system-isnt-rigged-a...) lean against the "rigged" argument, which is where I stand from a big picture perspective. Political shenanigans always happen, but regardless of this, demographics explain the result of the Democratic primary more than anything else. (That being said, in my opinion, the same demographics should frankly tell the Democratic Party to handle the Sanders supporters much better than they have been so far.)

I think this comment lowers the quality of the discussion. The comment asks us not take an exhaustively prepared article seriously without providing any evidence.

It's as though the comment is trying to prevent overracting, however weigh it against the threat of underreacting. The harm in taking these allegations too seriously (false positive) is doing research and finding out the statistics are invalid (extra research time). The harm in taking these allegations not-seriously-enough (false negative) is mass-scale election fraud.

Given how hard it is for such allegations to even be considered at all in our social climate (even when we all know they're much more technically feasible than people would like to admit) I think a defusing this article detracts from pursuit of truth in exchange for peace of mind.

> The harm in taking these allegations too seriously (false positive) is doing research and finding out the statistics are invalid

That's one possible harm, but I think it's also possible that people will take the allegations too seriously and withdraw from the political process entirely. One of the paradoxes of modern political life is that the elections that get the most attention aren't necessarily the ones with the greatest impact on our day-to-day lives. If you don't show up to the polls in November because {Clinton,Trump,Satan} will win anyways because of the rigged system, then you won't vote for mayor, school board, and local bond measures that can much more directly affect the policing policies in your town, the education your kids get, and the transportation infrastructure to get to your places of work or leisure.