​Why did Draupadi dishonor Karna by rejecting him as a suitor?

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Why did Draupadi dishonor Karna in her swayamvar by rejecting him because he was a charioteer? Answer. Firstly, the very word swayamvar means that one has, the bride has the right to choose who her lord, her husband will be. So Draupadi had a choice.
Now, of course, to make that choice, to facilitate that choice, certain targets may be set and whenever a target is set, there are certain qualifications which the participants are meant to have. So she was a Kshatriya queen, she was a Kshatriya princess and it was naturally expected that she would marry a Kshatriya king. So Karna knew that many people in society did not accept him as a Kshatriya because he was born a charioteer’s son and therefore it would have been, it was presumptuous of him to just assume that he could contest and if he had been a little more discreet in finding out whether he could contest or not, he could have avoided the dishonor.
Yes, certainly he was dishonored at that time and that is unfortunate, but rather than blaming Draupadi alone for the dishonor, we have to see that every society has a certain code of conduct, a certain set of expectations and going against that often sets a person up for dishonor. So for Karna to assume that he would be allowed to contest and by his marching ahead for contesting and being told he could not, he himself set himself up for dishonor, unfortunately. Now moving further, actually speaking, whether this whole incident of Draupadi refusing Karna occurred or not, that itself is debatable.
The Mahabharata is a huge book and sometimes there are interpolations in the Mahabharata. So the Mahabharata Atparinirnay is a concise analysis of the Mahabharata done by the great Vaishnavacharya Madhavacharya and he says, and this is what is also talked about in the version of the Mahabharata, which is the critical edition prepared by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, he says that actually Karna contested and Karna missed the target by a hair’s breadth. So the incident of Draupadi dishonoring him didn’t occur at all.
Now still because many extant versions and retellings of the Mahabharata do talk about this incident, so we can consider one more point that in such retellings, one more detail is talked about that when Arjuna contested, at that time Arjuna also was conscious. Now in the traditional hierarchy, a Suta is below a Kshatriya whereas a Brahmana is above a Kshatriya. But still Arjuna asked Dushya Duryodhana, he said this was a contest for Kshatriyas, can a Brahmana contest in it? And since none of the Kshatriyas had succeeded, Dushya Duryodhana looked at his father, his father said yes, a Brahmana is higher than Kshatriya, a Brahmana can contest.
Then Arjuna contested. So Arjuna exhibited some discretion, which unfortunately Karna did not. So what was going to naturally occur in that particular cultural setup, we cannot pin the blame of that on Draupadi.
Karna’s presumptuousness in expecting that such a thing would not happen, that was what unfortunately set him up for the dishonor.