Donald Trump thinks the elections are rigged, and he is (accidentally) right. So who is doing the rigging?

A. Legislators are rigging elections. They do this in three ways:

1. After each census, reapportionment takes place. In order to achieve 1 man/1 vote, legislative districts have to be redrawn, and some states lose, or gain, congressional representation. The party that controls the legislature after the census is in a position to redraw legislative boundaries as it sees fit, except that egregious gerrymandering is liable to result in court challenges.

2. Legislatures are able to suppress voter participation by setting up requirements that amount to a barriers to undesirable voters -- like having to have an official state ID. Or, the number of voting stations can be reduced, so that the wait in line is long.

3. Felons can be temporarily or permanently banned from voting. If there were just a few thousand felons, it wouldn't matter. There are, however, hundreds of thousands, maybe a million or two, felons. That's enough to make a difference. Given the pattern of crime in the black communities, and given the habits of law enforcement, a lot of the felons are blacks and blacks tend to vote Democratic. It pays Republicans to keep these riff raff out of voting booths

B. The political parties that organize the promotion of candidates to stand for, and win, elections control the process from precinct caucuses through the national convention, and then help or hinder the candidate who has been selected. The parties usually don't have to crudely control party members. If the party members are divided in who they want, the party has to negotiate to make the selection.

C. Candidates have control over their own campaigns, from sending up trial balloons to media blitzes in the last few days before the election. They make deals to win support. Deals = money.

D. Wealthy individuals can help bankroll a candidate, or give them meaninglessly small amounts of money. Candidates without money are SOL. (Running campaigns entails a host of large expenses.)

E. The printed and electronic press has a vital role to play, both in what they say, about whom, and what they choose not to say. If a decisions is made in editorial offices of a paper to ignore a candidate (maybe Jill Stein of the Green Party) then those who read that newspaper won't see any news about Jill Stein. If news room editors are all pretty much agreed that minor candidates aren't worth the bullets to shoot them with, then the public at large won't see much about any minor candidate. If Jesus was on a third party ticket, he could kiss his chances good bye. (It's safe to say that the two major parties wouldn't touch Jesus with a 10 foot pole.)

The standards news editors use to determine who is worth covering are not some recondite algorithm. It's pretty much plain and simple: we'll cover two candidates, one Democrat and one Republican. That's it. Minor party candidates can go fuck themselves. It's too messy and difficult to cover their various screwy, unpopular, odd-ball views on things--like single payer health insurance or passing a carbon tax.

So, are elections rigged, or not? I agree with Trump on this issue: Elections are most definitely rigged.