This cheating business from Colorado precedes Cruz.
COLORADO is for CHEATERS!
In 2012, 66,000 Republicans voted.
Rick Santorum beat Mitt Romney with over 6% of the vote.
Rick got only 6 delegates.
Romney took 28 delegates
Colorado’s good at cheatin’
Most the folks too high to notice.
Colorado was messed up in the 2012 General election. A friend of mine went to vote at his polling place and they told him he was marked off as voting already.
Whenever it started, it is indefensible and yet some here defend it and the disregard the GOP has for all voters. Voters are treated like the Dems do blacks— only noticed/valued at election time. It is time elected officials accept that they represent voters they don’t own them. They should work for us.
Of course you do. But you never consider, when I mention it, that “Ross Perot’s” party existed to nominate Ross Perot. And the Republican, Democrat, and all other parties exist to nominate candidates who are simpatico with the people who give those parties their structure.
The parties could not retain any ideological coherence at all if it were otherwise. Think of it as the GM Party, the Ford party, and the Chrysler party (to express the principle that parties are not limited to two. It is of course nonsense to speak of forming a “third” party when in fact there may be a dozen parties on the ballot in your state, not just two (and now that I think of it that way, I understand why “bipartisanship” as a synonym for “unanimity” has always given me the creeps).
Only when you recognize that the parties are not, must not be, in any sense creatures of the state do you catch a glimmer of why parties do not have an obligation to be internally democratic. Being political parties, of course, they need to put up a facade of democratic organization since, after all, their existence is predicated on the legitimacy of popular elections (at least within states and other political subdivisions). But the “Reform” party was never not going to nominate Ross Perot, even tho delegates nominally had the right to suggest other options. That was strictly a facade, and that facade was legal.
What is far less legitimate, OTOH, is for states to mandate open primaries. You only have the right, as a practical matter, to vote for Ford or GMC or Chrysler. And that is legitimate, in the sense that whereas a choice between candidate A and candidate B is a simple matter of “who gets the most votes,” the moment you expand the choices to more than three - say, to 100 million US citizens above the age of 35 - there is no mathematically principled way to choose among them. We see that in the current contest for the Republican Nomination, where there initially were enough candidates to conduct a “sweet sixteen” round of contests. Cruz’s position (which I know you reject) is that since Trump has never consistently gotten 50% of any vote, Trump has not earned a wave-through to the nomination from here.
It was an ugly process getting down even to three candidates, and whatever Cruz might say about Trump “winning” a crowded field with 30% of the vote no doubt applies to Cruz’s “placing” in that same crowded field. Possibly the GOP will manage in convention to nominate someone other than Trump or Cruz, and if so that will legally bind the Republican Party. And also, probably, doom it to electoral defeat if the Democrats do not find themselves nominating a felon who they recognize stands in violation of the Constitution in the full light of day.