Quote Originally Posted by imblest View Post
By getting a vote splitter to run, the party leaders are already picking the candidate.
While they may have an advantage, anybody can become a "vote spiltter". Ross Perot allegedly took votes away from President GHW Bush to give us Clinton as President. I feel he could have won but for the negative campaign by conservatives that a vote for Perot was a vote for Clinton. Many who would have voted for him bought that argument. Even though, he got about 19% of the vote with no party support. He was not a party-leader favorite. There was Jessie Ventura who seems to have come out of nowhere. No big money, no party support, just a message that voters went for. And of course, there is President Trump, who was certainly not a favorite of party-leaders. In fact there was floated the idea of Candidate Trump running as an independent. So your paranoia about party-leaders being able to appoint their favored candidate is overrated. We have George Soros, Tom Steyer and other rich people sponsoring what or who they want.

California has an election process that I have thought would be good before we had it. I had seen elections where the two best candidates, IMHO, were from the same party. And I would have liked the voters to have the choice between those two. But now, under those rules, we have several races where only Democrats are the two choices and many conservatives are crying foul. And I'm not happy with the choices I am left with. There seems to be no winning method as long as parties are in charge. To an extent I would prefer a wide-open primary where all of the people vote for all the candidates and the top two go into a runoff. Ideally we would get the two best candidates to choose from. Remember, Donald Trump took on 15 other candidates, many preferred over him, and came out as the candidate. Party-leaders did not pick him!