• givesomefucks@lemmy.worldOP
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    6 days ago

    The party can legally just ignore primary votes and name anyone for any spot in the general.

    If push comes to shove, I really can’t say for sure that they’ll all hand the keys over if it’s a wave. I think there’s a decent chance the close ranks, and if any state party doesn’t, the DNC cuts them off. Like, for the last decade they been standing on a pile of dynamite threatening to drop it if we don’t do what they say.

    Especially with age related cognitive decline, I think they’ll drop the match honestly believe they’re doing what’s best.

    Which is exactly why they need to go.

    • btaf45@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      The party can legally just ignore primary votes and name anyone for any spot in the general.

      In the same way that the US government can just ignore its own Constitution without violating any international laws.

    • Pips@lemmy.sdf.org
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      6 days ago

      They can’t legally ignore primary votes. It’s not necessarily a crime, but there is definitely a successful and very expensive lawsuit if someone wins a primary by the rules and the party just picks someone else instead.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldOP
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        5 days ago

        lawsuit

        The DNC literally have argued in court to a judge that they can do this and the judge agreed…

        It wasn’t even a decade ago, you’re almost definitely old enough to have lived thru it. And it was pretty big news at the time…

        The DNC argued the only-in-politics defense that the Sanders donors knew that the committee was biased toward Clinton, and therefore, it was under no legal obligation to be neutral or fair to all candidates.

        https://lawandcrime.com/opinion/bernie-sanders-donors-lose-case-alleging-dnc-improperly-tipped-the-scales-in-favor-of-hillary-clinton/

        The DNC legitimately said Dem voters should know that the DNC is corrupt and that they won’t let a fair primary happen.

        You’re talking like this is a hypothetical still, the lawsuit has already happened.

        But like, even just a few months ago we saw it happen:

        “Moreover, political parties have the constitutional right to determine the procedure by which they select their nominees, as repeatedly confirmed by the Supreme Court,” Foley said, citing the Supreme Court cases Democratic Party of United States v. Wisconsin ex rel. La Follette and California Democratic Party v. Jones.

        “The authority of the national parties to choose their nominee in the event the nominee can’t run comes as a surprise to many in this day of wall-to-wall primaries,” Elaine Kamarck, author of “Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates,” wrote in September. “And yet, it is a reminder that the choice of a nominee is party business — not state law, not federal law, and not constitutional law."

        https://www.factcheck.org/2024/07/experts-delegates-free-to-pick-democratic-nominee/

        People need to start paying more attention

      • futatorius@lemm.ee
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        4 days ago

        That’s entirely dependent on what other rules the party has. And legally, nomination decisions are entirely at the discretion of the parties, as long as they play by whatever their rules happen to be. Parties are not legally required to have primaries at all.

        • Pips@lemmy.sdf.org
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          4 days ago

          Right but if they don’t count primary votes that were cast, then there’s a cause of action because they’re breaking their own rules. It’s basically a breach of contract. There’s no cause of action for some votes being more valuable than others because those were always the rules. I don’t love that system, but it’s a private entity and those are their rules for picking a candidate to run in the general. It’s true that they’re not required to have a primary, but that’s irrelevant right now because the Dems do have a primary under their own rules.