On the afternoon of July 21st, the Democrats effectively stole the election. 87% of the votes In this year's Democratic presidential primary, Ballot cast — was scrapped, sending shock waves through the political landscape.

The presidential candidate chosen by these voters will not appear on the shortlist in the November election. President Joe Biden is no longer the presumptive Democratic nominee.

This unprecedented move raises serious questions about the integrity of our elections, the role of political elites, and the fundamental principle of our democracy that voters choose their representatives.

By way of background, our presidential primary system is very similar to the Electoral College: Voters vote for delegates, and the delegates ultimately meet to vote for candidates. Currently, in public opinion, these two acts are inseparable. When voters vote for president, they think they are voting for a candidate, not an elector. Similarly, primary voters think they are choosing a candidate, not a delegate.

But in 2024, elites and a select group within the Democratic Party have decided that the votes in the Democratic primary will not be counted. Technically, this situation mirrors faithless electors in the Electoral College, who can theoretically ignore candidates they support. That is, the democratic process seems to be undermined when the results of an election are taken away from the people and placed in the hands of a few individuals.

President Biden has not only ended his campaign, but has also endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. It remains to be seen what complex maneuvers will unfold, but two things are likely to happen. First, voters will have little say in who the Democratic nominee will be. Second, Harris is poised to become the nominee. Democratic Party They say she may not be or may not be fit to be president, and in fact in her only presidential primary she received only 844 votes and zero delegates.

So how will the left get Kamala to run for president and disenfranchise millions of Democratic primary voters in the process? A look at the party's history offers some guidance.

I've never heard of this in the last 50 years, but I've never heard of it in any political party. A long history The act of selecting candidates behind closed doors. Until 1968, the Democratic Party elite The Democratic Party chose Hubert Humphrey as its presidential candidate. Humphrey had never contested a primary election and was widely considered an unpopular candidate. To secure the nomination, Humphrey relied on President Lyndon B. Johnson's delegates to switch their support after President Johnson withdrew from the race.

The Democratic Party, in response to the disenfranchisement of Democratic voters by party elites, created the McGovern-Fraser Commission to investigate what had happened. Essentially, the Commission found that:

“It has often been difficult, expensive, sometimes downright illusory, and often impossible for Democratic voters to meaningfully participate in the selection of a presidential candidate.”

The recent decision to substitute Harris for Biden on the ballot is the same system of elite control that the committee denounced in 1972. Today, instead of Chicago political establishment and state party leaders, former President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries are working “behind the scenes” to oust the presumptive Democratic nominee, making voters' candidate choice completely illusory.

The prospects for Biden's reelection campaign are poor and have been trending downward for some time. This stems from widespread concerns about Biden's cognitive abilities, fueled by Special Counsel Robert Hur's February 8 diagnosis and by various other parties pointing out Biden's inadequacies. Yet Democratic voters, and Americans across the political spectrum, have repeatedly been told that Biden is physically and mentally healthy and that to claim otherwise is ageist and conspiratorial. After the presidential debate, Democrats dropped efforts to refute concerns about Biden's lack of health, and this voter manipulation became increasingly blatant.

But Democratic elites are used to this kind of election interference. Many believe the DNC “mockeryed” Sen. Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign, with leaked emails from The New York Times revealing efforts to spread negative press and schedule debates to damage Sanders' reputation. But these subtle violations of party neutrality pale in comparison to the current situation.

The move to throw out millions of votes and replace President Biden with Vice President Harris as the presumptive nominee calls into question the legitimacy of the Democratic primaries. If they are willing to throw out Democratic votes in the Democratic primaries, how far will they go to throw out Republican votes in the general election?

Restoring confidence in elections is more about who becomes the Democratic nominee, or how they become the nominee. Paying lip service to overused buzzwords like transparency and accountability is meaningless without a clear process to safeguard the integrity of American elections. Otherwise, Democrats risk turning the primaries into something akin to a banana republic.

“The July 21st action may have removed ineligible candidates from the ballot, but it came at the cost of declaring the votes of millions of Americans invalid. Democracy is based on the principle that people, not party elites or Washington insiders, choose their representatives, and any deviation from this idea threatens the very core of our political system.

Josh Findlay is director of the National Election Protection Project at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and former national director of election integrity for the Republican National Committee.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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