Or, perhaps a better question: Legally, how unfair can an American Presidential primary process be?
Is it possible, at this point, for a party to discard the primary system and go back to … well, smoking isn’t as common as it was, so let’s say ‘windowless rooms’ full of party bosses?
Is there any recourse if a candidate feels they’ve been unfairly barred from winning the primary due to vote rigging? In general, can a political party run a totally rigged primary by keeping people out of the voting locations and stuffing ballot boxes and so on?
(I suspect, based on my own knowledge and Wikipedia’s lack of mention of anything to the contrary, that, yeah, it’s pretty much entirely up to the party and that if the party bosses wanted to draw names from a hat or emulate Old Chicago (or Old New York and put a Tiger in their tank), it would be A-OK from a purely legal standpoint. Some verification would be nice, though.)