Tuesday, June 03, 2008
"Count every vote!" is what we've heard incessantly since the Democrats attempted a judicial hijacking of the Florida presidential count in 2000.
Seems pretty straight-forward on the face of it, but the 2008 primary campaign reveals heretofore unexpected nuances:
1. Barack Obama gets roughly forty percent of the sawed off Michigan delegation, although his name wasn't on the Michigan ballot. Memo to file: If you are fawned upon by the liberal glitterati, you can get a pretty good result even if nobody votes for you.
2. Delegates to the Democratic convention from Michigan and Florida, which have roughly 50 electoral votes between them, and both of which are critical to any hope of Obama winning in the general election in November, get one-half of a vote apiece, while delegates from Puerto Rico (not to mention Guam), which will have no electoral votes in November, will have a full vote at the convention.
3. Many delegates to the Democratic convention were elected by Congressional districts. Selection rules allotted delegates to Congressional districts according to the vote for the Democratic candidate in the most recent presidential and gubernatorial elections. Because the largest margins for Democratic candidates typically occur in predominantly black communities, black-majority Congressional districts received a disproportionate number of the delegates allotted in this manner. If you are a voter in Sheila Jackson Lee's district in Houston, your vote won your candidate more delegates than the vote of a Democrat unfortunate enough to live in a Republican Congressional district in West Texas. One man-one vote, anybody? Has anybody done the arithmetic to figure out if Barack would have snagged the nomination without this kind of disproportional representation?
In a campaign season rife with ironies, one of the most stark is that the candidate who says "we" are not Red states or Blue states but the United States has benefited from a selection process that stacked the deck on the basis of color.
Seems pretty straight-forward on the face of it, but the 2008 primary campaign reveals heretofore unexpected nuances:
1. Barack Obama gets roughly forty percent of the sawed off Michigan delegation, although his name wasn't on the Michigan ballot. Memo to file: If you are fawned upon by the liberal glitterati, you can get a pretty good result even if nobody votes for you.
2. Delegates to the Democratic convention from Michigan and Florida, which have roughly 50 electoral votes between them, and both of which are critical to any hope of Obama winning in the general election in November, get one-half of a vote apiece, while delegates from Puerto Rico (not to mention Guam), which will have no electoral votes in November, will have a full vote at the convention.
3. Many delegates to the Democratic convention were elected by Congressional districts. Selection rules allotted delegates to Congressional districts according to the vote for the Democratic candidate in the most recent presidential and gubernatorial elections. Because the largest margins for Democratic candidates typically occur in predominantly black communities, black-majority Congressional districts received a disproportionate number of the delegates allotted in this manner. If you are a voter in Sheila Jackson Lee's district in Houston, your vote won your candidate more delegates than the vote of a Democrat unfortunate enough to live in a Republican Congressional district in West Texas. One man-one vote, anybody? Has anybody done the arithmetic to figure out if Barack would have snagged the nomination without this kind of disproportional representation?
In a campaign season rife with ironies, one of the most stark is that the candidate who says "we" are not Red states or Blue states but the United States has benefited from a selection process that stacked the deck on the basis of color.
# posted by JGB @ 2:59 PM 
