I could be mistaken, but I thought the DNC had its rules, and the rules defined the penalty for violation of the rules. Michigan and Florida violated the rules.
Why didn’t the DNC just say something to the effect of “we must adhere to the bylaws if they are to have any meaning” and be done with the whole thing?
Probably out of fear that the residents of Michigan and Florida might get pissed off enough to vote for McCain in November.
So they wouldn’t “disenfranchise” the voters of Florida and Michigan, two states that will be important in November.
Politics is about perception, not reality.
I don’t think that defections are quite so likely as voters getting disillusioned and staying home — but either way, the DNC knows that they’d best throw the Michiganders & Floridians a bone.
So, we can probably expect the DNC to change the bylaws to a penalty of seating a full delegation with a half-vote?
Also, we may see a state willing to sacrifice half of its voting power in the future in an effort to line-jump ahead of New Hampshire?
With Florida at least, it was the state law passed by a Republican legislature and signed by a Republican Governor that mandated the date change, even though a Democratic delegation fought against having it pass. They could hardly be blamed.
As for Michigan though… search me.
I think there’s been discussion in GD about the extent to which the Florida Dems fought the change.
Once upon a time, I was a Gore delegate. Nobody challenged my credentials, but this is what I remember.
In theory, the convention delegates themselves decide who is credentialed, who gets seated and who votes, not the DNC, which is a separate body, some of whom may be delegates.
This duty is delegated in turn to th credential committee which inspects the credentials of every delegate who checks in, and if there is a challenge it goes to the committee, which makes a vote, which can then be appealed to the floor, or some such.
In theory, the credential committee can vote to seat all, none, or part of any delegation, or individuals. In theory, the convention as a whole can accept, reject or do something else.
As an aside, Hillary probably has/had the necessary votes to take the issue to the floor, which would have been impossibly messy. Unless she has another plan, the 50/50 thing was the de facto concession of the nomination to Obama
I don’t know how much they fought the overall bill, but what I understand they did fight was the merging of the primary date bill with another bill mandating paper trail ballots. Once the two were merged by the Republican majority there was little or no chance that the Democrats were going to vote against the ballot reform. I seem to recall hearing that the vote on the combined bill was unanimous, because of the fear of backlash against Democrats who voted against ballot reform.
Yes, they could be blamed. The bylaws allowed for this type of action so long as the Democrats in the state legislature put a “sufficient” effort into thwarting it. The DNC decided they had not done so.
And for good reason - the Democrats in Florida wanted earlier primaries as well, from all indications. They were playing chicken with the DNC.
A matter of perception to be sure and one which was undoubtebly clouded, if not driven, by a number of other considerations as well. The national party says they didn’t try hard enough, while the state party maintains the legislation was packed with unrelated issues they couldn’t in good conscience oppose. Guess blame’ll be levied by some and excused by others.
As noted, we’ve gone over this in GD. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember being convinced they did next to nothing to stop the process. Can anyone link to the GD thread where we hashed this over?
Michigan did not have an election. Obama was not on the ballot and nobody campaigned in the state. It was a non event. Do we say the voters of Michigan deserve no representation at all because of a few pushy dem leaders. ? That would be wrong . Sadly there is no decision possible that seems completely right.
I don’t understand why Florida and Michigan moved their primaries up and violated party rules in the first place. If they were told doing so would invalidate their delegate’s votes, why enagage in a childish pissing contest to be first?
They probably thought they could get away with it. The funny thing is that, at least this time around, it would’ve been better to have the primaries later on. At least on the Democratic side, the primaries in Feb and March were at least as important as those in Jan.
Except the penalty is worse then sacrificing half their vote, because that compromise is only being allowed now that almost all of the other primaries are over and its evident that seating half the delegates won’t change the outcome. Presumably if half the FL and MI delegates were enough to flip the majority of total delegates over to Hillary, there would be a lot more resistance to the current compromise.
So while they’re technically being allowed to seat half their delegates, in terms of actually choosing the nominee, I’d say that they still basically lost all of their say. And as John Mace notes, that’s in contrast to a fairly large influence they might have had on the process if they’d just followed the rules and waited till Feb or March.
Or they might have thought it inconceivable that the DNC would, in effect, nullify the votes all those Democrats who participated. The FL and MI party organizations might have taken it for granted that the DNC would sanction them in some way or other, but not by disenfranchising the voters. Now, if Obama doesn’t win the nomination with enough of a margin to make the FL and MI delegates inconsequential, then the general election will be tainted with doubt, for then who could say that the proper nominee might not be Clinton after all?
It took 175 years just make it possible for most adult citizens to vote. Now, the idea seems to be to tell some people that their votes don’t count. Where’s the outrage?
It’s worth noting that New Hampshire did exactly what Florida and Michigan did. New Hampshire went completely unpunished, maybe Florida and Michigan felt that it was a bit BS that one small state gets to openly violate DNC rules while the big states are taken to task for it.
(New Hampshire allows one state, Iowa, to hold a primary contest before it. The DNC tried to have Nevada holding its caucus prior to New Hampshire’s primary, New Hampshire basically said that it would move its primary to whatever date necessary to insure it happened before Nevada’s caucus. Yet, the DNC never once did anything to punish New Hampshire whatsoever.)