New York voted two days ago. Or to be more accurate, 18% of New Yorker’s voted. Most of the other 82% of adults probably wouldn’t have voted even if they’d been allowed to. But it’s pretty telling to read reports that more registered voters were barred from voting than the number of Party loyalists combined who showed up to the polls. Such is the reality of a closed primary.
So only registered Democrats and Republicans were allowed to vote in New York; that is if their names weren’t wiped from the registers or their party affiliation wasn’t mysteriously changed.
This is how those privileged few voted.
News reports declare that Clinton and Trump win New York in landslide victories. Nobody seems to notice that if the Parties joined their elitist elections, even Sander’s second place resoundingly beats Trump.
Landslides indeed. I wish we could get headlines that read: Clinton wins NY in a landslide of 7% popular support! Maybe then we’d start to grasp how incredibly undemocratic our system really is.
To reiterate from the 1st post in this series:
“Forget the parties with their delegates; the electoral college is a hangover from our racist beginning and counter to the principles of democracy. Plus, we inaccurately tend to think of the two parties as two halves of a whole when this is far from the reality. Forget the eligible voters. The fact that different states have different rules for who can vote also goes against our democratic ideals and demonstrates another reality of our unequal systems of power and representation. Let’s be radically simple in our take on democracy: One person, one vote. All equal.“