Many people have been advocating that superdelegates be eliminated from the nominating process and that a simply majority of pledged delegates should prevail. But our democracy does not always rely on simply majorities. How many votes does it take to end a filibuster in the Senate or overide a Presidential veto? In some cases a super-majority is called for in our democracy. When it comes to nominating a candidate for President, Democrats have traditionally required the winner to take two-thirds of the delegates. In the past, when no candidate broke that threshold the nominee was selected at the convention, where ballot after ballot was taken and backroom deals cuts. The process lasted days and often led to candidates with lesser delegate counts winning the nomination, such as Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and Adlai Stevenson in 1952. Instituted in the 1970s, the Superdelegates essentially curtailed schedule-busting convention fights. The support of a block of Superdelegates could put a candidate over the top, and as long as there were not three or more candidates splitting the pledged delegates and superdelegates, one round of voting was normally all that would be required — and if superdelegates announced their support beforehand a presumptive nominee could emerge to organize the convention. In the case of Obama and Clinton, if you strip away the 795 superdelagates and require one of them to reach the 2025 mark, he or she would have to garner 62-62 percent of the pledge delegates, close to the amount the Democrats have traditionally required. Many people are now calling for the nominee to merely creep over the 50% mark, but I assume the Democrats employ the two-thirds threshold for a good reason — just like breaking filibusters and overiding vetos. You either get overwhelming support from Democratic voters (who are really just a subset of all registered Democrats), or the delegates will have to hash it out at the convention to decide who is really the best person to put forward in the fall, regardless of the number of pledged delegates anyone might have. In fact, convention voters are delegated by we the voters to do just that. So it seems to me that either you allow superdelegates to participate in the process as independent agents, or the pledged delegates will have to vote at the convention until Obama or Clinton — or Joe Biden or Al Gore — emerges with 2025.