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.

The point is that people went to a lot of trouble to study bias in a process that in the past was widely just assumed to be biased. In this case, it's unlikely that the bias affected the overall outcome---Sanders lost by a large margin in the biggest states, a deficit that would be hard to overcome---but I think it does indicate a shift in how people view the parties.

The criticisms of hypocrisy are fair, but only go so far. If they violated rules, they were rules of their own making, and not rights granted by the Constitution. Voting for a party nominee is a privilege, and if the party chose to limit the voting pool to party officials only, they could do so without violating anyone's rights. Bernie is free to run as an independent, and his supporters are free to vote for him. If the DNC somehow interfered with that, they would be doing what Republicans are accused of doing with the Voter ID laws.