This past weekend, a couple of things in the election cycled caused me to take notice on how our country's elected leaders are chosen. I've known since I was young about the electoral college and all its wonders, as the forefathers intended. However, the "two-party system" has now found a way to circumvent the will of the people, and created a large swath of disenfranchised voters across all ideological lines.
The state of Colorado's Republican Party this weekend indicated that it would not cast any votes at the Republican Convention this year in Cleveland. Colorado awarded their delegates to Sen. Ted Cruz in what amounts to a mini-convention, without having a popular vote. This denied the state's Republican voters in having their say as to who they want representing them in the national election. The state GOP executive committee cancelled their August 2015 presidential straw poll so that their state delegates weren't bound to any one person, perhaps foreseeing the chaos of what now appears to be a sure-fire contested GOP convention.
Results like this aren't unique to the GOP however. In neighboring Wyoming, Sen. Bernie Sanders posted a 12-point victory over Democratic front-runner, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. However, after the votes at the caucuses were tallied, the Wyoming state Democratic Committee awarded Sec. Clinton 11 of the states 18 delegates. This, once again signaled that a private organization is denying the will of the people to do what they this is in their party's best interest.
Today, most of the political pundits are in an uproar over these results, and rightfully.
The average US citizen may not know that their political parties are not formally determined by the constitution in any way, shape, or fashion, not is their vote guaranteed to have any true value. The national committees of these parties largely determine the rules as to which their states' citizens votes count. Only the afore-mentioned electoral college is constitutionally mandated.
The United States has never been, in its almost two-and-a-half centuries of existence, a democracy. It has always been a republic. If the people of the country want to change how elections are truly performed in country, a Constitutional Congress will have to be convened to re-write, alter, or even scrap the current one in place, or an amendment to the current constitution will have to be legislated.
If you truly want another challenge to enter the race and disrupt the current state of affairs, you better put a lot of money behind it, because the current two parties in place will pour billions (yep, with a "b") of dollars to sniff that third candidate out. H. Ross Perot tried this back in 1992, and scored almost 20% of the popular vote, but never got a single electoral college vote. This is why you'll never see a Gary Johnson (from the Libertarian Party), or Bernie Sanders (who is a true Independent, but is running for the Democratic party nomination) really make any kind of true challenge to be elected President.
The country once before had a crisis that left the nation feeling disenfranchised, when slavery was abolished. It took hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Civil War to work through that issue. It might take that level of conflict again for people to truly have their say.
I hope it doesn't come to that....
