Iowa Caucuses, the American Election Cycle, and Why Electoral Reform is Necessary

By Caleb R. Newton

    United States Senator Bernie Sanders won the Feb. 1, 2016, Iowa caucus in the race for the November 2016 United States Presidential Election, but he didn’t actually win in the popular vote tally, or at least, so says the incomplete and questionable results as of the morning after the event. He only won in the sense of adding a significant amount of steam to his already fiery campaign. His opponent, Hillary Clinton appeared to be ahead by a 0.2-0.3% margin in the popular vote; the race was, in fact, declared a tie. Surprisingly, in the Republican Party, the frontrunner Donald Trump actually came in second place.

    Now, these results both matter and don’t matter to both Americans and to the rest of the world. The American electoral system to the uninitiated can be extremely complicated, since the process of electing the next United States President (that has officially begun as of Feb. 1) will carry on until the middle of November - months and months down the road.

    What went on in the Iowa caucus, and what will go on in the few other caucuses, basically amounts to voting town hall style, publicly and loudly, while most other states stick to the familiar private ballot. The Iowa Caucus is the first official contest of the American election cycle, but it is only concerned with choosing the candidates who will actually face off in the real election later in the year.

    The Iowa caucus and the subsequent commencement of the crazily election-filled rest of the year in America gives the opportunity to see some major holes in parts of the West’s electoral system. It is customarily termed “democracy,” but, in fact, the West’s election system is controlled actually by what may be termed crony democracy.

    The problem is quite simple: unelected and money grab driven persons in both the political parties and in the government itself control the political system with an iron fist. From a personal perspective, I can only speak from the point of view of living in the United States of America; but the same points that I am making in this article can apply elsewhere as well. The institutional acceptance of fake democracy and fake republicanism, and a fake cronyist capitalism, is deeply embedded throughout the entire world system. In both cases, complex institutions have been built up that only protect their own interests and those of whomever happens to be at their helm at the moment, to the exclusion of the interest of everyone else.

    A reform to remove all of the extra people, pronounced with an audible irritation, is absolutely necessary towards the reform of making the electoral system actually work. The United States of America’s electoral college system and party delegate system is a cronyist fraud, as is the dominance of any political party in any and all other countries.

    Some use the cover of fighting the rule of the mob to defend what amounts to an institutional chokehold on America and the West’s electoral system. The problem, though, is that the very fact that the citizens of any particular country will still be electing people after implementing democratic electoral reforms means that they will still be delegating their power to others just as they do now and mobocracy will be put off at least as much as it is now.

    As to the argument of, “Well, maybe there are just too many people in government, the citizens couldn’t possibly elect them all,” perhaps those “too many people” either shouldn’t have their offices exist at all or have way too much power, or both. Finally, as for the related question of having too many individual people on the ballot, in the absence of the political party driven system, one possible answer is to make a legal standard of a certain level of populist support as required to run for office.

    In conclusion, political parties must be, by law, dragged out of the electoral process. The more people in the election cycle, as is the case with the importance of political parties in the American system, the bigger and bigger gets the potential for corruption. There have been various and credible reports of fraud coming out of the 2016 Iowa caucus night, and this fraud is all based on the massive importance of the opinions and input of someone other than the voters themselves. Political party driven politics has to come to an end. Too much money and too many self-serving and pointless people are in the present system. 

(Image: Candidates Collage - JTA) 

[The views expressed in this publication are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Dissecting Society]