With the current heated race between Obama and Clinton, the inner workings of the primaries are becoming more public and being talked about in the paper and on the news. Prior to this year, I personally had no idea how the primaries worked. So, if you vote in the primary, your candidate may or may not be your party’s candidate, even if he or she receives a majority of the popular vote. First off, the delegates (which is OK as it is supposed to be representative of the people) aren’t required to vote for the people that they represented. Second, there are “super delegates” that can vote for whoever they want. These super delegates are random people (some important, some ordinary). Third, “the party” can make deals and put up whoever it wants (“the party” being the important people in the party). Fourth, “the party” can make up its own rules on who can vote. For instance, the Michigan and Florida Democratic primaries don’t count because they were held before “the party” wanted them held.
So, does your vote count? Got me. Yesterday when we were coming out of Target, someone registering voters said, “are you registered to vote?”. My flippant response was “unfortunately”. Why did I say that? I find it hard to believe in our political system when in this day and time, we can’t have a true democracy. How hard is it to get the total number of votes and elect someone? We could get this mess over with very quickly by letting each candidate lay out his or her plans and views, have a few rounds of questions submitted via the Internet, and then have people vote. We could do the entire election for a few million bucks and take the tens of millions spend on campaigning and help to finance the public debt or even attempting to balance the budget.