Disenfranchisement in Democratic Superdelegates and Caucuses

Disenfranchisement in Democratic Superdelegates and Caucuses

During my innumerable campaign articles, I came across several ways in which citizens or voters of a state get disenfranchised. I need to summarize these, at least for a lecture that I am going to give on the workings of the primaries and caucuses. The one thing I see to stress at this time, is that disenfranchisement leads to dis- or misrepresentation.

In principal, the Democratic use of proportional primaries should be and probably is a more representative system than the Republican winner-take-all basis. But it still has its faults.

As Senator Sanders and his supporters have pointed out, the inclusion of somewhat unelected superdelegates in deciding the presidential candidate disenfranchises the voters in the primaries and caucuses. I say somewhat unelected, since some of the superdelegates are elected Democrats in state or local governments. The PLEOs are the main elected state officials and congressmen, and are committed proportionally to the statewide vote. Other superdelegates are leading statewide party officials who may be elected by the party. The number of pledged delegates is 4,051, and the number of superdelegates is 714, giving the total of 4,765 delegates. So superdelegates are 15.0% of the total, or 17.6% over the number of pledged delegates. One thing that irked the Sander’s campaign was that the superdelegates committed early for Clinton, and could have easily discouraged Sander’s voters, volunteers, and contributors.

Another clear violation of enfranchisement and representation is the use of highly partisan and small turnout caucuses or conventions, which only represent a small fraction of the eventual presidential vote of a state. I count 18 caucuses out of 50 states, 5 territories, and D.C. The ratio is 18/56 = 32%, or a very large 1/3 of participating governments. Sanders benefitted overwhelmingly in these entities with what must have been excellent organization and using the enthusiasm of youth. By my amateur count, Sanders won 13 of the caucuses, and Clinton won 5. Sanders won 352 pledged delegates, and Clinton won 213 in the caucuses. The total number of pledged caucus delegates is 565, or 79% of the number of superdelegates.

It might be said that the caucus delegates are even less representative of the citizens of a state than the states’ superdelegates are. These highly partisan delegates not only fully participate in the choice of the party candidate, but of the votes on party convention and delegate appropriation rules, but also on the party platform. They also deny the convention any knowledge of what a states’ citizens want, but also do not allow the party to include the citizen’ desires in the platform or in the presidential campaign.

Three large states are the egregious violators of citizens’ fair representation: Washington with 111 pledged delegates, Minnesota with 77, and Colorado with 66. These pledged delegates make up a full 45% of all caucus pledged delegates. They should be pressured, by their own citizens at least, to have representative primaries. To further pressure them, we note that Washington has a population of 7.1 million, Minnesota has 5.5 million, and Colorado has 5.3 million. This is a lot of people to disenfranchise.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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