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.

Apologize for not referencing more evidence for the counterview.

So let me bring up some exhaustively prepared articles from the past. A lot of these are from the late 2000s when the "voter ID" issue was in play, but I do not think the electoral landscape has changed that much since then.

A report on voter fraud in 2007 from the Brennan Center concluded a very low rate of voter fraud in 2004. http://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/The%...

News21 (part of the Carnegie Knight media initiative) created a database of voter fraud. They found little. http://votingrights.news21.com/article/election-fraud/

We have this Washington Post reporter who tracked voter fraud, and found little. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-com...

And... another paper on how "voter fraud is in the eye of the beholder." (Harvard Law Review) http://www.harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/anso...

So... that's a lot of data (I could link many more reports from this era) that indicates that, frankly, voter fraud from any angle really hasn't been a big issue before (and that any perception may be due to political bias, perhaps). I do believe there's plenty of inefficiencies regarding the American electoral process, and that might be right ("inaccurate, costly, and inefficient" as the Pew Center on the States alleged in 2012, that I buy -- http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_as...). But there's a difference between incompetence and awful systems, and outright fraud.

I must acknowledge that this isn't the only paper alleging fraud in the 2016 primaries (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6mLpCEIGEYGYl9RZWFRcmpsZk0...). I will note however that, for this one, Snopes was skeptical in that the numbers had not been peer reviewed by independent parties (http://www.snopes.com/stanford-study-proves-election-fraud-t...) and note counter-viewpoints ala Joshua Holland of The Nation (who does not think much of "exit poll conspiracies": https://www.thenation.com/article/reminder-exit-poll-conspir...)

This is why I'm very cautious. Bias is huge in politics; it may be exhaustively prepared, but if they are using bunk statistics, it's not worth much.

What are you talking about? Those articles are generic studies about past elections, there's no theoretical way those studies could have found whether or not there was an issue in the 2016 election.

It's okay to take back something you said in error in HN, you don't always have to double-down.