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A republic if you can keep it - Ben Franklin.

Regardless of what system we have, the result of any process depends on two things:

1) Do people educate themselves
2) Who shows up

The ignorance of the process by people on this site which attracts political junkies demonstrates how lazy we are to educate ourselves in this country where we take everything for granted.

People on this political site, people who donate money to campaigns, people who claim to be supporters of AFP, Heritage, FRC, NRA, etal dont show up.

The FR Georgia page lists over 50 FReepers in GA 5th Disrict and 30,000 R primary voters and only 0.015% show up to choose the delegates to the national convention? Of the hundreds of precincts over 95% of the precincts had ZERO people show up to vote for delegate.

If we dont show up and dont know the process, we have only ourselves to blame.

Now, although I reject people playing the victim card ... a victim of the establishment, the fact is that the establishment does do things of omission and comission to facilitate ignorance and lack of participation.

Omission. Just as many dont show up. Those who do show up only half-show up. At the GA 5th convention, one member of the credentials committee did not show up. The job fell to the one who did show up (the Trumpster who was slated and won a delegate slot to Cleveland). She had total control of the credentials and was not prepared. She made mistakes on who was, or was not, credentialed. She was not part of a conspiracy. She is a volunteer. She should be praised for the many thousands of volunteer hours she had dedicated to Trump and the cause. But she could not do it alone.

Omission. Those who do show up could do a better job of communicating when and where the meetings occur and what the significance is of those meetings. But they are volunteers and how many more hours should they volunteer when the rest of us are not volunteering anything?

Commission (sort of). At the GA 5th convention, the chair, parliamentarian, secretary and credentials chair ...those who controlled the conduct of the meeting were 4 of the 6 people on the slate created by the nominating committee.

When the chair and parliamentarian declared it would require a 2/3 vote to reject the slate they were on the appearance of conflict of interest arose. Due to extensive conversations with them, I can say that this was not part of a conscious plan or conspiracy. They had just not thought it through.

Commission (true conspiracy). I have not seen this in GA where Ive been 3 years. But it definitely did exist in the past in IL. When Bob Kjellander (Karl Rove college roomate) ran the IL GOP and the RNC as Treasurer, controller of the money and paid staff on behalf of Rove there was definitely a conscious conspiracy of House Speaker Hastert of Kjellander’s IL GOP closed club to keep outside the club anyone who was not a member.

They didnt want nobody what nobody sent, as Mike Royko describes IL politicians.

But even during those dark years in IL, the anti-establishment Republicans could win when they worked hard and worked smart eg Sen Peter Fitzgerald. We lost many times. And when we lost, it was always because we did not educate and prepare ourselve and/or we did not show up... and since there was a massive effort to educate and get people to show up we have only ourselves to blame that we lost.