Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the exact wrong poster child for voting rights.

Coretta Scott King wrote in her four-decades-old letter about Jeff Sessions, the Trump administration’s nominee for U.S. attorney general: “Anyone who has used the power of his office as United States attorney to intimidate and chill the free exercise of the ballot by citizens should not be elevated to our courts.”

In this regard, Elizabeth Warren is no different than Sessions.

In 2012, Warren used her power as the big-money insider candidate to steal from the voters the choice between two qualified candidates. I know because I was the other qualified candidate. State law requires a candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts to garner 10,000 certified signatures from voters of the commonwealth, within a small window, during the coldest months of the year.

My grassroots campaign secured 14,600 signatures, many more than required. And in any other state, besides Utah, to my knowledge, that would have been enough. My name would have been on the ballot and Democratic Primary voters would have had a choice. But, the Massachusetts Democratic Party does not believe in choice for voters. It only believes in control and manipulating outcomes.

After signatures, the party requires candidates to go through a Soviet-style convention, wherein party insiders gather and usurp the choice from the voters. There, they demand that a candidate get 15 percent of the delegates, even though voters already declared their desire to have that person on the ballot. It is the quintessential, “I know better than you” elitism that doomed us to a Trump victory in the U.S. presidential race.

But it wasn’t always this way. Michael Dukakis created this disqualifying, rigged convention in 1982 to shut down his competition in his race for governor.

The Massachusetts Democratic Party convention is for one thing only: to shut down outsiders. It is not for democracy. And, 14,600 voters said my name should be on the ballot, but a mere 3,261 party insiders said the voters should be denied a choice on the ballot. And so they were.

Those 3,261 apparatchiks obliterated the will of 14,600 voters and decided the race for approximately 2 million actual voters. What does that say about Democrats’ commitment to democracy?

Elizabeth Warren used this process to stomp on another woman, with her paid lobbyists on the convention floor. She didn’t have to. She could have called for a nomination from the floor for both of us. She could have honored the voters’ declared wishes in having me on the ballot and committed to a competitive primary. Instead, she chose the low road of exclusion and voter choice denial.

A man shuts up a woman on the Senate floor and there’s total outrage. A woman shuts up another woman and shuts out voters and there’s deafening silence.

Massachusetts Democrats are appalled that Pennsylvania voted for Donald Trump. But you can say this for my childhood home state — it is an open democracy, not a closed shop. In Pennsylvania, to run for U.S. Senate, a person needs only get 2,000 voter signatures. In Massachusetts, a state half the size, it is 10,000. Get it?

The current Warren outrage may win a media cycle, but Rust Belt voters won’t be impressed when they learn of the way she used the bullying tactics of an insider convention to win her Senate seat. Latching onto the queen of ersatz democracy is a bad idea, and Democrats make her their standard bearer at their peril.

I know what Liz supporters and Massachusetts Democrats will say — the party has a right to make its own rules. Well, maybe. The constitutionality of it hasn’t been tested. But even if parties do have a right under the First Amendment’s freedom of association clause, should they persist in this farce of democracy? Just because the KKK has a First Amendment right to speak, do we think it’s a good thing when they do?

The disqualifying convention is a total affront to the democratic process. Massachusetts Democrats should be truly bold, trust in the voters, and rid themselves of this scourge. If they don’t, Donald Trump will use it to trounce his way to victory in 2018 and 2020, using the state party to stain every Democratic candidate as anti-voter, anti-democracy and anti-American.

Marisa DeFranco is an immigration lawyer from Middleton.