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A Modest Proposal for seating Michigan Delegates
In Michigan, we will hold County/Congressional District conventions in 2 weeks, on March 29th. That is how the national convention delegates are actually selected.
In most CDs, the delegates are evenly split between Clinton and "Uncommitted". Clinton did not win a large enough margin to be allocated an extra delegate in many places.
At the upcoming County/Congressional District conventions, allow the delegates to (re-)organize themselves. Make them all officially uncommitted. Those delegates could be seated at the national convention, and trusted to vote their conscience.
There is considerable local discussion about whether "superdelegates" can take seats already allocated for "uncommitted" convention delegates. This would be wrong.
Therefore, no superdelegates from Michigan should be seated, nor should they be permitted to attend the national convention in any capacity. They should not be allowed to be county/state uncommitted delegates.
Superdelegates are the folks that are responsible for flouting the national party rules. Penalize them, not the general populace of the State of Michigan.
Comments (2)
Gee, and I thought we'd run out of options. So under party rules the elected delegates can vote against the results in their districts? There's still the issue of who didn't vote because they were assured it didn't matter.
Two good things about your idea:
1) it counts the votes but instead of following the primary numbers the delegates could essentially act like superdelegates, and
2) there's not enough time between now and then for either campaign to locate and pounce on enough delegates to make a difference.
According to Reuters, here's where MI stood a few days ago (based on one poll, so who knows):
"A poll last week by the Marketing Resource Group for the Inside Michigan Politics newsletter showed Michigan voters divided over which candidate they would support, and whether the primary should be rerun at all.
Obama led Clinton 44 percent to 43 percent among likely Michigan voters, according to the poll, which had a margin of error of 5 percentage points."
shrunklink.com/anbo
March 19, 2008 4:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hey anonymous,
How in the world do you MAKE delegates who support Hillary Clinton OFFICIALLY uncommitted???? Are you forgetting this is a democracy and party leaders can't simply, you know, change votes they don't like?
And by the way, there's considerable doubt whether it's possible to avoid seating superdelegates at all, for legal reasons. The argument is that the DNC rules say that superdelegates "shall" be seated, and in legal terms, that language of mandate supercedes the ability for the party to restrict the seating of superdelegates. If you want to know more, google it.
March 19, 2008 4:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
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