WASHINGTON — After the glowing testimonials, the gracious concession by Bernie Sanders, and the star power of the current president and an ever-popular past president, Hillary Clinton is sure to get a bounce in the polls from this week’s Democratic convention.

With virtually the same certainty, however, the other woman running for president this year, the Green Party’s Jill Stein, will also get a bounce coming out of the Philadelphia convention.

Even though Sanders urged his supporters to back Clinton, a stubborn #NeverHillary faction are poised to flock to Stein, potentially draining votes from Clinton that may — in the headline of the Washington Post’s print edition — “rob” the former first lady of the election.

Voters exercising their right to pick the candidate of their choice aren't robbing anyone of anything. This election, contrary to what she and her supporters may think, doesn't belong to Hillary Clinton.

On the other hand, it really is robbing someone of an election if you sabotage the mechanics of primary elections in the way the Democratic National Committee appears to have done to favor Clinton over Sanders.

Who knows what kind of momentum Sanders might have generated with a more robust schedule of weekday prime-time debates ahead of the first primary contests? Perhaps enough to tip that razor-thin margin in the pivotal Iowa caucuses in Sanders’s favor, lending him much more momentum in the subsequent voting.

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Jill Stein, who has been actively canvassing for disaffected Sanders voters even at the Democratic convention itself, has an answer for those who stand ready to blame her if Clinton loses.

“I think there’s no question that if Donald Trump gets elected, Hillary Clinton gets the blame because she knocked out Bernie Sanders through backstabbing and sabotage,” she said in an interview with a German newspaper, which apparently was more willing to give her a voice than our own mainstream media.

Trump, with his fascist tendencies, would be a terrible president, in her view, but so would Clinton. Nor would she drawn into the false dilemma of whether they would be equally bad.

“I’m saying if we want to answer the threat of fascism, we need true progressive policies,” Stein told Handelsblatt. “Hillary Clinton isn’t going to do that. She’s going to intensify this crisis. That’s not to say they are the same; they have different ways of operating, but these are both two disastrous candidates for the future of America and the world.”

All the talk about third-party candidates may be responsible for a President Donald Trump are in fact true — but not in the way it is usually meant.

It is precisely because people have been ignoring third-party candidates that an outsider like Trump was able to take over one of the two major parties that insist on exercising a monopoly in U.S. politics.

If the Republican establishment is in tatters today, it is because it never listened to the message being sent by the 19% of the voters who supported Ross Perot in 1992. Call it Perot’s late revenge that a populist businessman opposed to job-killing trade pacts is now running under the aegis of a mainstream party instead of on his own.

“ All the talk about third-party candidates may be responsible for a President Donald Trump are in fact true — but not in the way it is usually meant. ”

This year may mark a similar fate for the Democratic Party. By sabotaging and suppressing the millions of voters who supported Bernie Sanders, the party is driving them to a third-party alternative that could cost their nominee the election.

These disaffected voters are willing to suffer the consequences of a Trump presidency if that is the only way to bring reform to a party that in their view has exceeded what is considered an acceptable level of corruption.

What else can you call the Clintons’ ability to amass a personal fortune of more than $100 million in “speaking fees” and collect billions more in a slush fund posing as a foundation but which spends only a fraction of its money on charitable works?

Many boomers still blame Ralph Nader for Al Gore’s Electoral College loss to George Bush in 2000. They see Nader’s third-party campaign as an ego-driven vendetta that gave us Bush, the Iraq invasion, and all the terrible consequences that have flowed from that.

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Democracy, we are told, is about compromise, living in “the real world” as Sanders himself told his followers this week.

But democracy is first and foremost about voting for the candidates who represent your values and policies. Drawing a line beyond which you won't compromise is just as “real” as submitting to the lesser of two evils.

Gore won the popular vote and would have become president if we didn’t have an obsolete indirect voting system that skews results.

If we truly wanted democratic elections in this country, we would ditch the Electoral College, and vote for president in a two-stage runoff election, much like France, which also has a presidential system of government. This would ensure that the winning candidate would get a majority of those voting.

As a first step, we could do away with the arbitrary 15% polling threshold to participate in presidential debates. A much lower threshold — say 5% or even 3% — would keep the number of participants low but allow both Stein and Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson to take part.

Stein told Fox News this week that her next goal is to cross that 15% threshold — she currently is polling between 1 and 5% — to take part in the presidential debates. “Then all bets are off,” she said, because voters will have a chance to decide for themselves who best represents their values.

But corporate interests, which virtually control both major parties, like the two-party system the way it is, so it is unlikely there will be any change, either in the Electoral College or the presidential debates.

It is only the American people, who are supposed to be running the country, who are unhappy with the status quo.

That is why you have a Donald Trump running as the Republican nominee and why Jill Stein may indeed attract votes that Hillary Clinton can’t, but which she needs to win.