Wednesday, November 2, 2016

On The Media #3 - The Power of "Rigged"

It has been said by Donald Trump many times throughout this election season that the election is rigged. Trump did not introduce this notion of the system being rigged, though. Elizabeth Warren said in her speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2012,  "people feel like the system is rigged against them. And here's painful part, they're right. The system is rigged." The Power of "Rigged", from On The Media, discusses how the system is rigged in a way, but Trump uses the term 'rigged' to explain why this election is not fair and why the media is in favor of Hillary.

The term 'rigged' has been given different meanings based on who uses it. Bernie Sanders said, “What has upset me, and what I think is – I wouldn’t use the word rigged, because we knew what the words were – but what is really dumb is that you have closed primaries, like in New York state, where three million people who are Democrats or Republicans could not participate, where you have situation where over 400 superdelegates came on board Clinton’s campaign before anybody else was in the race, eight months before the first vote was cast. That’s not rigged. I think it’s just a dumb process which has certainly disadvantaged our campaign.”

The system is rigged--or 'dumb' as Bernie said--in a sense; however, it is very unlikely it could be rigged in the conspiracy theorist way Trump implies it to be. Trump's rigged election conspiracy has many factors, including the media's negative portrayal of him, candidates running against him who are actually working for Hillary, dead voters, "phony" polling, andmore. President Obama and others explain that, "the decentralized nature of our state-by-state system makes the coordinated hijacking of a national election all but impossible. Such a feat would require coordination and conspiracy on a truly massive scale— with so many participants that many would surely be caught in the act" (Mello-Stark, 2016).

Politico. Samuelsohn. Oct 25, 2016. A guide to Donald Trump's 'rigged' election
Vox. Mello-Stark. Nov 1, 2016. The election can't be 'rigged'--but the voting system has plenty of problems

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