A free election doesn't mean people -- even powerful or rich people -- can't campaign against you. It doesn't mean political parties can't internally organize their candidate nomination procedures. And surely it doesn't mean that the candidate who got fewer votes (as Sanders did) is obligated to win.

Sanders entered the race polling at 2%, campaigned like hell, got close to winning, and had a material impact on the party's policy trajectory. And he did this despite taking deliberate steps throughout his career to make it harder for himself to take power within a political party -- for example, by not joining the party until he declared his intent to run for its leadership, by not doing much to work with anyone in the party on legislation or fundraising, and generally by keeping a low national profile before deciding to run.

Debbie Whatshername emailed saying she was in the tank for Clinton? Yes, duh. Party elders and professional leadership are permitted to have an opinion about who they want to win, If you show up at a club you've been trash-talking for years and expect to take it over, you can't reasonably be mad when the people who have been running it for years have their

The idea that the elections aren't free is also undermined by the scattershot way in which Sanders supporters defend institutional design choices. For example, Sanders performed better in states with caucuses than primaries. Caucuses are less democratic, because they induce low turnout because of the high barrier to participation. But Sanders' campaign and his supporters like caucuses. Sanders performed worse in states that did not allow independents to participate in the Democratic party. But Sanders' campaign and his supporters view this rule as an offensive affront to democracy. The common element is not the institutional design ex ante, it's the ex post impact of that design on Sanders' chances.

None of the arguments Sanders made about getting a bum rap are evidence of institutional dysfunction. There is no country on earth that has institutions that don't have these characteristics. Many very healthy democracies have internal party leadership conventions that look much like U.S. nominations pre-1968 (only party elders vote, byzantine favor trading to get the nomination) let alone what they look like today, which are much more open and democratic. America has made more progress reforming its primary elections and generally elicits broader participation in them than almost any country.

But set aside all this and it's is not even a good case study. If your position is that the system is rigged so that outsider candidates don't win, how do you explain Clinton losing to game theory in the early stages of 2008? How do you explain Trump winning in 2016? Primaries result in outsider candidates winning. This has been one of the main challenges for political scientists, who want to seriously study institutional design. Before 2016, the canonical text on primaries was "The Party Decides" -- that party elites, through endorsement, cross-fundraising, ballot access, and the "invisible primary" decide the outcome of elections. No one is reading "The Party Decides" in 2018 because, well, you see the hell we live in.

Disclaimer: I live in America but can't vote here, and I would have voted for Sanders, not Clinton, in the primary. It's not because I'm a neoliberal shill, it's because your post reminded me of a first-year student I taught once who argued that the U.S. isn't a democracy because "Monsanto, maaaaan".