Posted on 02/24/2016 4:21:36 AM PST by ctdonath2
Sitting here, eating a bagel and watching the Nevada results on a giant screen in the CNN center lobby, I note the reporters' focus on percentage votes while awkwardly trying to ignore the real scoring: delegate counts. I'm wondering if the odd treatment of the rules is actually preparation to replace them.
Delegate based "republican" (small 'r') voting is anathema to majority-rules "democratic" (small 'd') voting. Might we be seeing the start of an attempt at eviscerating representative voting with plurality/majority voting, ultimately ending the Constitution's electoral system?
FR thoughts?
What kind of bagel?
“Everything” toasted, with cream cheese.
The bagel isn’t laced with anything?
Not that I know of. Sleep deprivation plus Atlanta traffic may be the cause of what you’re implying.
Sounds good. I’m kinda hungry.
” ending the Constitution’s electoral system?”
Not at least until Hillary’s delegate votes are counted. That’s the way she’s going to beat Sanders, hands down.
Could be, they need the delegate system to win despite their core aversion to anything resembling republican governance. They’re acting like they want to turn the public against delegate systems, clearing the path accordingly, but are infighting over when because the popular vote isn’t in their favor.
You won't see a shift to pure majority winner-take-all primaries if it means that the parties give up super-delegate control of the outcome.
-PJ
It’s posted under “chat” and “miscellaneous”. I believe you can suppress threads so marked.
It’s also marked “vanity”. You didn’t have to click on it, just as I don’t click on threads marked “satire”.
FReepers are allowed to initiate discussion.
What is going on here, after all? Most people, and I mean MOST people, don't see it. Are "we" really engaged in the selection of the next president, or are we in fact spectators of the earliest stages of "the established parties" choosing whom they will nominate as their "official" candidates for that office in next November's General Election?
At the heart of this question is defining what these parties are, are they public or private organizations?
They hide their private status to avoid sanction under the laws Congress has applied to every government, such as the Voting Rights Act, for example. But if these are private entities, why are the various governments spending tax revenue to finance their delegate selection primaries, etc. And if they are using tax funds, how do they escape the establishment clause, and many and various other liabilities under the Constitution, yet again?
I'm not suggesting there is anything illegal about political parties, of course, or "partisanship." But I can't see the compelling state interest, the clear and present danger that allows the partisans who control the Congress and the legislatures and, thus, every leaver of government to "establish" political parties.
And if they can ( they do ) then these para-constitutional entities are subject to the liabilities that supposedly make it illegal to submerge the voting power of citizens living in States with later primaries under votes cast in the early States. That would be illegal, even if it hasn't ever been challenged.
The Electoral College, on the other hand, is proportional, even if diluted, to population and Statehood. What is illegal are pacts between various States that have not been approved by Congress, like the "agreement" among some legislatures to award their Electors to whomever wins the national popular vote for president.
Personally I enjoy the free exchange of ideas and abhor those who would squash such if given the power. Some of the best threads I have read here at FR have been vanities.
It needs revised to only assign delegates to citizen counts not human counts.
This would eliminate the need to check for citizenship, you would only have to prove you live in an area.
No more illegal voters swinging elections.
Well at least it is in General Chat and not News/Activism, unless the mods moved it.
Are you sure you are watching CNN? I was watching it last night and they were talking delegate counts. They did some interesting hypotheticals on delegate distributions for the upcoming Super Tuesday primaries.
going back to when gore lost the presidential election, the left .ist has been trying to get rid of electoral college. They have wanted the popular vote to be the winner.
Easier to stuff a ballot box than to deal with delegates
Although George Washington did warn us about them in his farewell address:
"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."
For good or ill, the political parties will often allow their respective states to run their elections, in which case they may be subject to the laws of the states they're in.
Caucuses tend to be financed and run completely by parties so they can do whatever they want. If they want winner-take-all then fine. If they want to allot all delegates by congressional district, or split delegates between congressional districts and the candidate with the most votes then that's fine as well.
Primaries tend to be financed in large part by the state. So in some cases you have open primaries because the legislature or the voters asked for it.
There is no hidden agenda. The Democrats have been very open about using superdelegates to prevent a repeat of the McGovern nomination. The Republicans have been upfront about encouraging most of the early primaries to award delegates proportionally and the latter primaries to be winner-take-all.
The hope of the GOPe was that there would be one GOPe candidate against a sea of conservatives. The single GOPe candidate would get his share of the early primary votes while the conservatives split their vote and died off one by one. Then the GOPe candidate could cement a victory with the remaining winner take all primaries at the end.
The strategy didn't work because there were too many GOPe candidates, Bush was a much weaker candidate than they had thought, and Trump appeals across a wide section of the electorate. So even in proportional delegate states he takes a large percentage of the delegates.
It will be interesting to see how the GOPe pivots to prevent a future Trump. They might move toward something like the Democrat superdelegate approach. That would be an open admission of failure, but there are enough Republicans who are too busy taking their kids to soccer practice that they might just be able to get away with it.
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