The future of our country is in the hands of voters, and now more than ever, it is important to remember what it means to be an American.

All views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not represent the Roar as a whole.

    Without a doubt, the topic that has been headlining all news broadcasts, social media, and family dinners is the 2024 Presidential Election. Everyone keeps hearing the phrase ‘every vote counts,’ which is absolutely true, but then how come not one American voted to nominate Kamala Harris as the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee? Is that really democracy?

    The process of becoming a presidential candidate is long, tedious, and challenging, so here is a simplified breakdown of the process.

    Preparation for running begins long before the public sees. Candidates take months, or even years, to finalize and perfect their running process. In the spring of the year before an election, candidates register with the Federal Election Commission to run for president. After announcing their candidacy, the Primary and Caucus debates take place from January to June of the election year. 

    Six to nine months prior to the election, primary voters choose their preferred candidate on a ballot. Caucus meetings, run by political parties, are where the number of delegates given to each candidate is determined. The number of delegates selected is based on the number of caucus votes they receive. Delegates are determined by a set of complex rules, which vary for each state. After being selected, delegates represent their state at national party conventions.

    July to early September is when parties hold nominating conventions to choose their presidential candidates. This is also when the selected candidate will announce their vice president. 

    The presidential debates occur between September and October of the election year, while the actual election is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The election date this year is on Nov. 5, 2024. 

    Electors in the Electoral College don’t cast their votes for president until December, and January of the following year is when electoral votes are counted by congress. 

    Jan. 20, 2025 is Inauguration Day for the 47th President of the United States. 

    To become the presidential nominee, a candidate typically has to win a majority of delegates. This usually happens through the party’s state primaries and caucuses. State delegates go to their party’s National Convention where they vote to confirm their choice of candidates.

    There are different kinds of delegates: pledged delegates, bound delegates, unpledged delegates, and superdelegates. Pledged and bound delegates must support the candidate they were granted through the primary or the caucus process, and unpledged delegates and superdelegates can support any presidential candidate they choose. 

    Now, for how all of this information relates to democracy and the upcoming election: Harris’s presidential nomination didn’t follow all of these rules and steps. 

    After President Joe Biden stepped out of the race, he endorsed Harris two weeks later. In a Democratic National Party (DNC) virtual vote, Harris secured the necessary votes from pledged delegates to be an official presidential nominee. What people aren’t talking about is how this took away our right of democracy; that we the people didn’t vote for this or truly have a say in our government. 

    It’s important to recognize that once Biden’s campaign started to go downhill, the Democratic Party and Biden’s lifelong political acquaintances turned on him. Biden repeatedly said that he was not going to drop out of the election, but once the tables started to turn and his chance at winning was going down, the democratic leadership took control, pushed him out, and took our votes away. In the primary, 14,465,519 people voted for Biden, but after he was pushed out, 4,567 of the delegates changed the votes of those 14 million people to Harris. That is a direct threat to our democracy. 

    Biden was in office for three and a half years, and it was known that his mental and physical health were declining. That didn’t stop him from running for reelection, even though he was no longer fit for the position. Only when the Democratic Party became likely to lose in the election did they push Biden out. If Biden wasn’t on the ballot from the start, there wouldn’t be a debate about if this election process threatened our democracy. 

    The reason Harris received these votes was because pledged delegates are obligated to cast their vote for who they were granted in the Primary. That would have been Biden, but now it was Harris, as she was the only eligible Democratic candidate. The reason she was the only eligible candidate was because she was the only to receive the 300 delegate signatures needed to gain access to the virtual ballot. So all of the pledged votes that had been for Biden were transferred to Harris. How is that democracy? The answer is, it’s not. 

    It was clear that after Biden stepped out of the race and endorsed Harris, she would be the only serious candidate for the presidential nomination. After Biden’s performance in the debate and his declaration to drop out, it seems like he has been forgotten about altogether. It makes you think about if this was all planned from the beginning.  

    So without bringing up any of the values, views, and beliefs of the current presidential candidates, is Harris’s nomination justified, or is Harris and the Democratic Party the real threat to the democracy of the United States? 

    Your vote does matter, and so does our democracy. To vote, click here. 

    Research and sources in this article are from https://www.usa.gov/.