I've heard about enough of the "count every vote" nonsense coming from
. It's time for a little Politics 101.
The nomination process, whereby a political party decides which candidate will represent the party, is inherently different from a general election. Different rules apply, as the end result is not a swearing in. What's more, the rules for a party's nomination process are drawn up by the national and state parties, and have very little to do with the Constitution.
If the Democrats decided that they wanted their nominee to reflect the important purple hair constituency, they'd make a rule that only people with purple hair could vote in the primaries. Fair? Of course not. But many of the contests are hardly fair, for one reason or another.
State parties make rules that benefit the state parties. Often that means running a traditional caucus, requiring participants to show up and stay long enough to be counted. This way, parties are assured of names and addresses of future volunteers. Or they try for the best of both worlds: a primary, run by the state (and free to the party) as well as a caucus, as in the Texas prima-caucus. Even when a state party elects to participate in a state-funded and -run primary (remember, nominees for other offices are also chosen, typically at a state-run primary) they'll decide how to award the delegates from their state—and how many delegates each state gets is determined by the national party. For instance, this year the Democratic Party rewarded states that chose to go later in the year with more delegates. (Ironically, Florida and Michigan would have each received more delegates if they'd stuck with their original dates.)
Some delegates are cut in half—ouch! But it insures "states" like Democrats Abroad can have a larger number of total delegates.
Not only are the types of elections arbitrary, but the rules are often written in such arcane and confusing language that only with the help of the powers that be in the party are they understood at all. I saw this first hand during New Mexico's 2004 caucus, which involved in-person voting from noon to 7 p.m. at 200 locations around the state, as well as mail-in ballots. Yet the rules were written so specifically that it was easy for a campaign with on-the-ball observers to challenge any ballot that didn't strictly adhere to the rules. You thought dimpled chads were fun—try stars and check marks that don't count as an actual vote.
No. It's not fair. But was the stripping of delegates from Florida and Michigan unfair?
The Democratic Party, for reasons you may or may not agree with, wants candidates with little money and little name recognition to compete on as even a playing field as possible. In small states like Iowa and New Hampshire, this is easy. Jimmy Carter would never have been elected president if the first state to vote had been California. But in Iowa a candidate is able to literally go door to door, talk with a large percentage of the state's voters. (One in eight Iowans actually met at least one candidate this year.) Media markets in large states are prohibitively expensive. A candidate with name recognition and mega-bucks would automatically have an advantage. Until recently, the only way to raise mega-bucks was via special interests. (Howard Dean changed that; Barack Obama perfected the strategy.) Yet even by January, few candidates—even well-funded ones—have raised the many millions they need to compete in large media markets.
So when Florida and Michigan decided to hold their primaries right after Iowa and New Hampshire, the DNC Rules committee decided to strip them of their delegates, after first warning them that's what would happen. Why not simply halve their delegation, like the Republicans did? Because candidates would still want to campaign in states that only had half a delegation. But, because of the expensive media markets and the number of offices needed in large states, only the well-funded and/or well-known candidates would have stood a chance.
The Democrats, remember, have been the party of the "little guy" for some time. It's a perfectly good philosophy, just not entirely fair to the big guys—and the big states.
Is it fair to reinstate half of Florida and Michigan's delegations now, at this late date? Not really. Many people stayed home instead of voting on election day. Many people voted without knowing anything about the candidates, since campaigning had been forbidden by the party. Some people, living abroad, decided to vote in the Democrats Abroad Global Primary instead of Florida or Michigan—which Obama won with 68% of the vote. And in Michigan, some people undoubtedly voted for Clinton since the name of the candidate they preferred wasn't on the ballot. (Others voted for Mitt Romney in the Republican race, hoping to create chaos in the Republican primary, never knowing that the real chaos was in their own party.)
There is no truly fair solution. The other states and territories played by the rules—what's the incentive for them to do so next time if Florida and Michigan are absolved of all their sins? And sins they were—there is even a video of a Florida Democratic legislator mockingly "opposing" the primary date decided by the Republican controlled legislature. The state party officials were entirely complicit in the decision to flaunt the national party's rules.
One more point about nominations: In recent years, only a handful of states have really had any say at all about who the nominee is. The battle is effectively over within 6 weeks or so of Iowa's caucus. States that chose to wait were, one could say, punished by having their voices—their votes—not matter. Is that fair? No. That's one reason the Democratic Party varies the calendar. In 2004, New Mexico was one of the early states, along with 6 other "sorta-super Tuesday" states. This time around, Nevada, with its large ethnic population, was chosen to go third.
It's really not a bad way of doing things.
There are other inherently unfair rules in the nomination system. Many of them are far more egregious than stripping Florida and Michigan of their delegates when they broke the rules. How about the practice of letting Puerto Rico have more delegates than half the states, while not a single Puerto Rican citizen is allowed to vote in the general election? Nevada chose to allocate more delegates to rural areas than urban areas—is that fair? What about Democrats Abroad allowing internet voting—couldn't someone have cheated?
In a word, or three, Get Over It.
The nomination is over. We have a nominee. Prolonging a fight over delegates from Florida and Michigan won't change that, but it might mean that Democrats won't win in November.
So I hope the Rules committee make a decision as quickly and painlessly as possible, and Clinton supporters like Harold Ickes and Terry McAuliffe stop going on about "let every vote count." Because that was never the intention, and they—the very ones who wrote the rules—know that.