Donald Trump is right: The election IS rigged (though not in the way he thinks)//Balkinization:

Americans are possessed of the strange notion that their Constitution is scriptural.  Mitt Romney even voiced the view that it is divinely inspired.  A more reasoned view is that of William Lloyd Garrison.  The great abolitionist saw it as "a Devil's pact...dripping with blood".  When the enormous blood of the Civil War re-founded the nation  new compromises were struck.  The compromise of 1877 secured white restoration in the deep south while creation of the western rectangular states promised to guarantee a Republican majority in the U.S. Senate.
Today we have in all but name replaced Lincoln's party with a white nationalist party quite like LePen's National Front in France.  The GOP is openly obstructionist and uninterested in governance.  A major portion of the population embraces or tolerates the groundless - e.g. that Barack Obama is a foreign born Muslin; that climate change (if it exists) is not related to human activity.  The great gerrymander and winner take all elections leaves us with no exit.
 The arc of history of which President Obama may bend toward justice but the arc is tilted.
- gwc

 Balkinization: Donald Trump is right: The election IS rigged (though not in the way he thinks)
by Sandy Levinson (UT Austin School of Law)

...we are victimized by our dysfunctional and even "imbecilic" Constitution. It's not only the craziness of, practically speaking, needing to rev up a constitutional convention in order to repeal a statute that made a great deal of sense in 1842 and generates really terrible consequences today; it's also the fact that the insane difficulty of constitutional amendment makes the very idea "unthinkable" among practical and "thoughtful" people as defined by the Washington Beltway and other centers of "thoughtfulness."
And Democrats are so eager to dismiss the ravings of the narcissistic sociopath regarding his own demented notion that the election is rigged--how else could somebody so magnificent actually lose the presidential election--that they/we are unwilling even to lay the basis for the deep critique of the American political system that assures that the election of Hillary Clinton, if the Republicans keep the House, will make, at best, a marginal different domestically, other than saving us from the prospect of a sociopathic president. That will be something to be grateful for, but it won't one whit lessen the overall political and constitutional crisis that faces the country and that most people simply wish to ignore because we have a Constitution that seems to assure there is no way out of it.