Touchscreens are great, if you can make them hard enough to hack. Unfortunately, the prevailing touchscreen voting machines make your local 7-11 cash register look like Fort Knox. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a slightly weirder or more confusing paper voting system then one that makes massive-scale voter fraud as easy as sticking a USB thumb drive in the voting machine.
As to the Democratic primary, you have a point on principle, but from a practical standpoint that doesn't really work so well. As you yourself stated, the Primaries aren't really a democratic election in their own right, and the party would be completely within it's rights to just declare a candidate. They're doing us a courtesy by allowing us a voice in the process at all.
Keeping in mind that the ultimate objective is to win the general election, all the steps along the way should be angled towards that goal. The purpose of the primary election step is to choose the best candidate to represent us in the general election. Right now, it seems like some people are forgetting that the primary election is just a step on this path, because dragging it out HURTS the ability of EITHER candidate to compete in the general election, which is the real purpose of this whole process.
If I thought that Hillary still had a real chance, then I'd be all for her continuing. However, she would need to win every remaining contest, in a LANDSLIDE, to stand a snowball's chance in hell at the convention, and even then it would be a very small chance. All the continued contest accomplishes is piling more dirt on Obama, making McCain's life easier in the general election.
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Date: 2008-06-03 08:30 pm (UTC)As to the Democratic primary, you have a point on principle, but from a practical standpoint that doesn't really work so well. As you yourself stated, the Primaries aren't really a democratic election in their own right, and the party would be completely within it's rights to just declare a candidate. They're doing us a courtesy by allowing us a voice in the process at all.
Keeping in mind that the ultimate objective is to win the general election, all the steps along the way should be angled towards that goal. The purpose of the primary election step is to choose the best candidate to represent us in the general election. Right now, it seems like some people are forgetting that the primary election is just a step on this path, because dragging it out HURTS the ability of EITHER candidate to compete in the general election, which is the real purpose of this whole process.
If I thought that Hillary still had a real chance, then I'd be all for her continuing. However, she would need to win every remaining contest, in a LANDSLIDE, to stand a snowball's chance in hell at the convention, and even then it would be a very small chance. All the continued contest accomplishes is piling more dirt on Obama, making McCain's life easier in the general election.