Summary
Donald Trump announced plans to reform U.S. elections, including mandating paper ballots, same-day voting, voter ID, and proof of citizenship, while eliminating mail-in voting.
Trump criticized California’s ban on requiring voter ID, calling for a nationwide overhaul. Though mail-in and early voting surged during the pandemic, Trump has long opposed these methods, claiming fraud, despite evidence showing fraud rates are extremely low.
Critics argue his proposals could disproportionately affect rural, disabled, and nonwhite voters, potentially disenfranchising key Democratic-leaning groups.
The reforms would mark significant shifts in U.S. election policies.
And (totally as a hypothetical) if pro corporate interests decided to interfere with primaries by donati g insane amount of money to pro-corporate candidates to ensure corps always win regardless of what letter is by the President’s name…
Would you describe that as the illusion of choice when after decades those peo corporate interests controlled the parties and then (totally legally) directly influence the primary and ensure the corpo candidates always “wins”?
And I’m not trying to be a dick here, but unless we fix primaries, we’ll never really “win” in the general, even when the Democratic candidate wins.
Your point is completely legit.
Everything we believe about choice is an illusion. Propaganda. The dream is fiction.
The public believe only 2 options exist. Because, no viable other options exist. At the moment. Any third party is either a spoiler by design, or so limited in scope as to be useless to most.
Maybe now is the time to start another. A serious effort to form a citizen controlled, truly democratic, accountable, party. With its own primaries and rules. For the people.
Not next election cycle.
The DNC and RNC are irredeemably rotten because of the very concerns you’ve mentioned.
Can’t repair rotted wood. You can cut out the decay and try to patch it up but you’re left with an unstable structure.
You need to replace it.
The difficulty is when the money realizes it could interfere and run propaganda to de-legitimize.
Honest people who can own their faults, who are not afraid of their skeletons, who cannot be blackmailed, are needed.
An impossible task to be sure.
But, a lot of things have been impossible.
If qanon and the tea party can take over a party in a few years…
Does anything other than tradition prevent a candidate from running in the primaries of both the R and D conventions? Could the same person end up as the candidate for both parties?
2028 might provide an answer the way things are going…
I don’t know the answer but I would assume party rules would prevent that somehow.
But, if someone ran for and won the R nomination and the D didn’t do a primary to officially nominate anyone, and that person crossed the aisle… I have no idea what would happen. Maybe it is possible.