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 The results echo complaints from Republican front-runner Donald
Trump and Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders that the system is
stacked against them in favor of candidates with close ties to their
parties – a critique that has triggered a nationwide debate over
whether the process is fair.
The United States is one of just a handful of countries that gives
regular voters any say in who should make it onto the presidential
ballot. But the state-by-state system of primaries, caucuses and
conventions is complex. The contests historically were always party
events, and while the popular vote has grown in influence since the
mid-20th century, the parties still have considerable sway.
One quirk of the U.S. system - and the area where the parties get to
flex their muscle - is the use of delegates, party members who are
assigned to support contenders at their respective conventions,
usually based on voting results. The parties decide how delegates
are awarded in each state, with the Republicans and Democrats having
different rules.
 The delegates' personal opinions can come into play at the party
conventions if the race is too close to call - an issue that has
become a lightning rod in the current political season.
Another complication is that state governments have different rules
about whether voters must be registered as party members to
participate. In some states, parties further restrict delegate
selection to small committees of party elites, as the Republican
Party in Colorado did this year.
'SO FLAWED'
"I’d prefer to see a one-man-one-vote system," said Royce Young, 76,
a resident of Society Hill, South Carolina, who supports Democratic
front-runner Hillary Clinton. "The process is so flawed."
Trump has repeatedly railed against the rules, at times calling them
undemocratic. After the Colorado Republican Party awarded all its
delegates to Ted Cruz, for example, Trump lashed out in a Wall
Street Journal opinion piece, charging "the system is being rigged
by party operatives with ‘double-agent’ delegates who reject the
decision of voters."
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has dismissed
Trump’s complaints as “rhetoric" and said the rules would not be
changed before the Republican convention in July.
Trump swept the five Northeastern nominating contests on Tuesday in
Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island. The
New York billionaire has 950 delegates to 560 for Cruz, a U.S.
senator from Texas, and 153 for Kasich, the Ohio governor, according
to the Associated Press. A total of 1,237 delegates are needed to
secure the Republican nomination.
On the Democratic side, Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, has
taken issue with the party's use of superdelegates, the hundreds of
elite party members who can support whomever they like at the
convention and who this year overwhelmingly back front-runner
Hillary Clinton.
Clinton has repeatedly emphasized that she is beating Sanders in
both total votes cast and in pledged delegates, those who are bound
by the voting results - rendering his complaints about
superdelegates moot.
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On Tuesday, the former secretary of state won Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Delaware and Connecticut, while Sanders won in Rhode
Island. Clinton leads Sanders by 2,141 delegates to 1,321, according
to the AP, with 2,383 needed to win the nomination.
Sanders has also criticized party bosses for not holding enough
prime-time television debates and said before a string of primaries
open only to registered Democrats this month that “independents have
lost their right to vote,” referring to a voter block that has
tended to favor him.
A Democratic National Committee official was not immediately
available to comment.
'ARCANE RULES'
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for
Politics, said the U.S. presidential nominating system could
probably be improved in a number of areas, but noted that the
control wielded by party leadership usually became an issue only
during tight races.
"The popular vote overwhelms the rules usually, but in these close
elections, everyone pays attention to these arcane rules," he said.
Some 51 percent of likely voters who responded to the April 21-26
online survey said they believed the primary system was "rigged"
against some candidates. Some 71 percent of respondents said they
would prefer to pick their party’s nominee with a direct vote,
cutting out the use of delegates as intermediaries.
The results also showed 27 percent of likely voters did not
understand how the primary process works and 44 percent did not
understand why delegates were involved in the first place. The
responses were about the same for Republicans and Democrats.
Overall, nearly half said they would also prefer a single primary
day in which all states held their nominating contests together - as
opposed to the current system of spreading them out for months.
The poll included 1,582 Americans and had a credibility interval of
2.9 percentage points.
(Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Leslie Adler)
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