For
rotten boroughs to have any say in the decision about the best
candidate to produce the number of electors that are necessary to win
a majority comprised of blue and purple states in the Electoral
College is both counterproductive for purposes of effective
nomination strategy and also discriminatory toward those who should
in all fairness make that decision of a suitable nominee themselves.
The power to nominate should be solely in the hands of those states
who will produce the nominee's victory, shared in proportion to their
respective, fairly expected, contributions to the Electoral College
victory.
Rotten
boroughs were first declared unconstitutional in the Baker
v Carr
line of cases.
This is considered one of the great Supreme Court reforms of
American democracy. But the rotten borough system lived on in the
Democratic Party to dilute the influence at the nominating Convention
of a reliably blue state like Minnesota. This injustice is supported
by inappropriately directed sentimentality about inclusion of or
openness to fellow Democrats in red states. This generous fellowship
which causes inequality may be the product of a logical glitch in the
liberal brain.
See Chris Mooney, The
Republican Brain
(2012).
In
Reynolds
v Sims (1964),
the
case that established the democratic principle of one person one
vote, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that " trees
or acres" should not be represented in legislatures. Similarly
states devoid of electoral votes should not be represented in making
a nomination. States whose electoral votes will with mathematical
certainty be cast not for, but against, the Democratic nominee should
not be involved in determining the nominee. It is the prospective
Democratic electors sent from blue and purple states to the Electoral
College that must be equally represented in the nominating Convention
convened for the sole purpose of producing those electors.
The
weight of a Democratic delegate's vote can only fairly and properly
be determined by the share of Democratic electoral votes the
delegates' state represents, as that can best be determined from past
experience. Giving away equal voting power to states who represent
no such past electoral votes dilutes the voting power of those delegates
who do. "[W] e
must look facts in the face."
Awarding votes as if every election will be a landslide, shut-out
victory for Democrats is a fantasy that results in discrimination.
As
Chief Justice Warren said in Reynolds:
"Overweighting
and overvaluation of the votes of those living here [rotten boroughs]
has the certain effect of dilution and undervaluation of the votes of
those living there. The resulting discrimination against those
individual voters living in disfavored areas is easily demonstrable
mathematically. Their right to vote is simply not the same right to
vote as that of those living in a favored [rotten borough] State.
Two, five, or 10 of them must vote before the effect of their voting
is equivalent to that of their favored [rotten borough] neighbor."
The "favored neighbor" in the DNC rotten borough system are the
red states most susceptible to corrupt plutocratic influence.
A
DNC rule change could very simply abolish this corrupt, undemocratic,
and questionably
constitutional, system. In an Electoral College system, electors
should be the determining factor for awarding equal representation in
the nominating Convention, not individual voters. Voters made
irrelevant by state law because they are insufficient in number to
support a single elector should not be allowed to dilute the voting
strength of delegates from states that have reliably sent electors to
the College over time. The governing factor is the variable number
of electoral votes assigned to every state in accordance with the
Constitution. A rule change would mathematically discount the weight
of votes of rotten borough states. The adjustment to that number to
determine a state's voting strength would be determined on the basis
of the state's actual historic, not theoretical, contribution to
Democratic membership in the Electoral College.
The new formula would end the false pretense that, since a nominating Convention necessarily precedes an election, blue state delegates must suspend disbelief that red state delegates represent anything but a rotten borough devoid of any remote prospect for delivering essential Democratic electors.
Drafting and enforcing such a rule ending discrimination against blue and purple state voters is simple. The Electoral College results in the previous election provides the strongest evidence whether any potential electors are resident in any state. The voting strength of a state based on its number of electors should be cut by 50% if the state produced no electoral votes for the party in the previous election. The remaining 50% weighted voting strength would be reduced a further 20%, 15%, 10%, and 5% respectively for each previous election where no Democratic electors show up in the state. This covers a full generation back in time. If a state has contributed no Democratic electoral vote in the last 20 years -- which is longer than the lifetime of the youngest born-bankrupt Millennial voter -- its nominating Convention voting strength should decline to zero. A 20-year missing persons statute of limitations would thus run on any continuing pretense that prospective electors are likely to show up in a rotten borough state, and therefore should be represented based on that fiction at the next Convention.
This adjustment of voting strength would apply to every deep red state named above that Clinton won and is currently being promoted as supporting her inevitable "victory." The case against counting such red state delegates is even stronger in the three Plains States that Sanders won, and the two more he will likely win. They have furnished Democratic electors only once in eighty years.
The
DNC should therefore stop the pretense that Clinton won anything that
should influence her nomination in these red states by stripping
voting rights from delegates representing rotten boroughs. In a
democratically organized primary system her "big victory" would
thus add up to zero delegates, and she would have to concentrate her
triumphal celebration mainly on that one-delegate victory in
Massachusetts.
To
repeat one last time, when the only rational conclusion is that no
Democratic electors live in a state, since they have not shown up at
the Electoral College for a generation, then that state should have
no voting delegates at the nominating Convention. Giving voting
power for non-existent electors only serves to unfairly dilute the
voting power of those states where Democratic electors have resided
and regularly voted for more than a generation, or even two in the
case of Minnesota.
To
give delegates votes where they represent no electors is the same as
enfranchising a rotten borough like British royalty used to do. Aside
from being inherently undemocratic by treating unequals as equal,
rotten boroughs have always been more prone to corruption and
manipulation by powerful interests.
2.
Exclusionary
primaries
A
principal means by which corrupt political parties rig elections is
by keeping tight monopoly control over their ballot access privilege.
The United States, more than virtually any other country in the
world, is a two party system which structurally marginalizes third
parties to the point of irrelevance, or worse. Control over one of
the two ballot slots conveys very valuable duopoly political power.
This gives rise to a multiplicity
of means by which political parties rig primary elections, mainly for
the purpose of excluding the participation of independents or other
disfavored demographics. In this way the duopoly can consistently
provide two bad choices for general election voters, as evidenced by
typically low voter turnout by many Americans who reject them both.
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