This election cycle offers an unparalleled opportunity for the movement to organize and cast off the yoke of the corporate duopoly that controls our election space. The behind-the-scenes nefarious actions that the parties use to control the elections have been more obvious than usual and have been brought to the public's attention repeatedly. The public seems more aware that the election process is not working as it should in the sort of democracy that the US tries to convince us we live in.

Awareness of the corruption of the process should be a great boon to bringing about demand and support for serious reforms from a broad segment of the public.

"The Elections Are Rigged"

This election cycle the management of the election process has been more obvious than previous cycles. Trump, the (currently presumptive) Republican candidate has repeatedly called the election process rigged - and he has made considerable noise about other institutions, such as the justice system being "totally rigged."

Bernie Sanders will not say that the elections were rigged (though large numbers of his supporters would not agree with him on this) and instead calls them "dumb":

"I wouldn't use the word 'rigged,' because we knew what the rules were," Sanders said on "Face the Nation." "But what is really dumb is that you have closed primaries, like in New York State, where 3 million people who were Democrats or Republicans could not participate. Where you have a 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."

There was significant evidence that the Democratic primary was wired for Clinton before it even started, with Clinton having received the pledges of 60% of the superdelegates back in August of 2015. The media continuously hyped Clinton's overwhelming superdelegate advantage throughout the primary cycle:

Last night, the Associated Press — on a day when nobody voted — surprised everyone by abruptly declaring the Democratic Party primary over and Hillary Clinton the victor. The decree, issued the night before the California primary in which polls show Clinton and Bernie Sanders in a very close race, was based on the media organization’s survey of “superdelegates”: the Democratic Party’s 720 insiders, corporate donors, and officials whose votes for the presidential nominee count the same as the actually elected delegates. AP claims that superdelegates who had not previously announced their intentions privately told AP reporters that they intend to vote for Clinton, bringing her over the threshold. AP is concealing the identity of the decisive superdelegates who said this. ...

This is the perfect symbolic ending to the Democratic Party primary: The nomination is consecrated by a media organization, on a day when nobody voted, based on secret discussions with anonymous establishment insiders and donors whose identities the media organization — incredibly — conceals. The decisive edifice of superdelegates is itself anti-democratic and inherently corrupt: designed to prevent actual voters from making choices that the party establishment dislikes. But for a party run by insiders and funded by corporate interests, it’s only fitting that its nomination process ends with such an ignominious, awkward, and undemocratic sputter.

Then there were the various machinations of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the heinous DNC chair, in Clinton's favor. As the generally affable Bill Moyers writes:

It’s the skullduggery going on within the Democratic Party establishment that’s our current concern and as we wrote in March, Rep. Wasserman Schultz “has played games with the party’s voter database, been accused of restricting the number of Democratic candidate debates and scheduling them at odd days and times to favor Hillary Clinton, and recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper that superdelegates — strongly establishment and pro-Clinton — are necessary at the party’s convention so deserving incumbent officials and party leaders don’t have to run for delegate slots ‘against grassroots activists.’ Let that sink in, but hold your nose against the aroma of entitlement.

Then, of course there were the election irregularities and vote suppression activities in a variety of states, with suspiciously targeted voter roll purges in New York, a broken voting process in California followed by vote suppression activities in the form of early media announcements calling the nomination for Clinton before the polls opened, an intervention in Nevada by Harry Reid delivering the vote to Clinton, followed by a rigged Nevada State Party convention after which a nationally-known reporter whipped up a pack of lies about violent Sanders supporters, then there was the fraud of Arizona and electoral "shenanigans" in a variety of states that all seem to favor Clinton.

Suffice it to say, that there is considerable awareness in the public mind by this point that the US election process at best has serious flaws, at worst is completely fraudulent.

This is a choice?

For decades, the corporate parties and their partners in the 1% media have monopolized the political space in the US gradually increasing their control to the point that we inhabit, as political scientist Sheldon Wolin describes it, a managed democracy, "a political form in which governments are legitimated by elections that they have learned to control."

If the corporate duopoly at their respective conventions deliver the candidates that the 1% media has telegraphed are to be the "winners," we will have the two most reviled candidates ever standing for President in modern history as "the choice" for the people.

Public revulsion at the pathetic choice between 1%er's Tweedledee and Tweedledum should make an easy sell of the contention that the two major parties are moribund and incapable of putting forward a decent candidate - and that the way that Americans choose candidates needs to be changed.

The movement needs to use this opportunity, a teachable moment if you will, to push for the sort of dramatic electoral reforms that will make a competitive, unified party of the 99% possible. I emphasize the word competitive because the 99% can create parties all it wants, but until the unequal rules set up by the corporate duopoly to disadvantage third parties are ditched in favor of a level playing field, successes will be largely symbolic. If a third party spends most of its energy just getting on the ballot and jumping through the hoops that the duopoly sets up for them, it will dissipate. (Witness the history of third parties for about the last hundred years.)

Some of the things that we need to change are disadvantageous federal financing laws and the lack of uniform election rules among the states. We need to dump the bipartisan Presidential Debate Commission that blocks participation by third parties and address the lack of media coverage of third party candidates. Also, we need to move to some form of proportional voting rather than the current winner-take-all systems which mostly turn third parties into agents to advantage one of the 1% corporate duopoly candidates over the other. Given the events of this primary season, a push for open primaries in every state is could be pushed as an equity issue, since independents outnumber membership in either party and primaries are funded by the public and closed primaries bar independents from voting in elections that they have paid for.

Protest at the polls

An expedient method for getting the public's attention and organizing people to demand these reforms would be to extend the concept of electioneering a bit and protest at the polls.

Given the high negatives of both candidates, many people will likely be in a frame of mind to hear (and maybe join in) complaints about a process that could produce such a pair of vile, unacceptable candidates for the highest office in the land. The best chance is that few of the voters will be completely satisfied with one of the candidates; most and will have just voted against one or the other. Those that voted Green or Libertarian will almost certainly be receptive to the need for reforming the process.

The other expedience of this campaign is that it would be irresistible to the media. While the corporate media will surely attempt to portray it as a movement of a bunch of offbeat individuals who have just emerged from their secret hide-away lairs of fringe politics - free media exposure is a good thing and the message, like that of the "outsider" candidates this cycle will probably resonate with a broad public in ways that our dark corporate overlords don't anticipate.