Democrats disenfranchised voters by switching candidates

On the afternoon of July 21, the Democratic Party effectively stole an election. completely 87% of the votes in the Democratic presidential primaries this year — 14.4 million of the ballot papers distribution — were dismissed, sending shockwaves across the political landscape.

Those voters' choice for president will not be on the ticket in November. President Joe Biden is no longer the presumptive Democratic nominee.

This unprecedented move raises serious questions about the integrity of our elections, the role of political elites, and the fundamental democratic principle that voters choose their representatives.

For context, our presidential primary system works a lot like the Electoral College. Electors vote for delegates, who eventually meet and vote for candidates for office. Now, in public perception, these two acts are inseparable. When voters vote for president, they believe they are voting for the candidate, not the electors. Similarly, voters in primary elections believe they are selecting candidates rather than delegates.

But in 2024, a select group of elites and people in the Democratic Party decided that votes in the Democratic primary do not count. Technically, this situation reflects faithless voters in the Electoral College, where voters can theoretically ignore the candidate they are committed to. Ultimately, the democratic process is undermined when the outcome is taken away from the citizens and placed in the hands of the decisions of a few individuals.

More than simply ending his electoral candidacy, President Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. While we don't yet know what maze of gameplay skill will ensue, two things are likely. First, voters will have little or no say in who the Democratic nominee will be. Second, Harris is now close to becoming the nominee, even though about 40% of Democrats say he wouldn't make a good president or they aren't sure he would. In fact, in her only presidential primary, she received only 844 votes, receiving 0 delegates.

So how will the left install Kamala as the presidential candidate and disenfranchise millions of Democratic primary voters in the process? A look back at the party's history charts a potential path forward.

Although it had not been seen in the last 50 years, the political parties have one long history to select candidates behind closed doors. As recently as 1968, the Democratic Party elites selected Hubert Humphrey as a candidate for the presidency. Humphrey had not competed in any primary and was widely considered the least popular candidate. To secure the nomination, Humphrey relied on President Lyndon B. Johnson's delegates to transfer support to him after Johnson dropped out of the race.

In response to the disenfranchisement of Democratic voters by party elites, the Democratic Party created the McGovern-Fraser Commission to investigate what happened. In essence, the Commission found:

“The meaningful participation of Democratic voters in choosing their presidential nominee was often difficult or costly, sometimes entirely illusory, and in not a few cases, impossible.”

The recent decision to replace Biden with Harris at the polls echoes the same system of elite government denounced by the commission in 1972. Today, instead of Chicago politics and state party bosses, President Barack ObamaSenate Majority Leader Chuck Schumerformer president of the Chamber Nancy Pelosiand House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries worked “behind the scenes” to oust the presumptive Democratic nominee, making the voters' choice of their candidate completely illusory.

Biden's re-election campaign prospects were poor and had been declining for some time, due to widespread concern about Biden's cognitive ability, spurred in part by special counsel Robert Hur's February 8. evaluationand a wide range of actors highlighting that of Biden inadequacies. Yet Democratic voters, and Americans of all political affiliations, were repeatedly told that Biden was physically and mentally fit, and that claims to the contrary were ageism and a conspiracy. After the presidential debate, the party ended efforts to refute concerns about Biden's lack of fitness, making this voter manipulation even more blatant.

However, the elites of the Democratic Party are not strangers to this type of electoral interference. Many believe that the Democratic National Committee “laughed” at Senator Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign. revelations of the leaked emails, according to the New York Times, include efforts to generate negative press and schedule debates to harm Sanders. But these subtle violations of party neutrality pale in comparison to the current situation.

The decision to discard millions of votes and replace President Biden with Vice President Harris as the presumptive nominee calls into question the integrity of the Democratic primary. If they are willing to throw away Democratic votes in a Democratic primary, how far would they go to throw away Republican votes in a general election?

To restore faith in our elections, which is more important: who becomes the Democratic nominee or how did they become the nominee? Paying lip service to overused buzzwords like transparency and accountability is pointless without a clear process that protects the integrity of American elections. Otherwise, the party risks turning its primaries into the stuff of banana republics.

The actions on July 21 may have removed an ineligible candidate from the ballot, but they did so at the cost of invalidating the votes of millions of Americans. Democracy is based on the principle that the people, not party elites and Washington insiders, elect their representatives, and any deviation from that idea threatens the very core of our political system.

Josh Findlay is the director of the National Election Protection Project at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the former national director of election integrity for the Republican National Committee.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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