Feb 17, 2008

S.N.A.F.U.

So people are actually, seriously talking about letting the Michigan and Florida delegates vote at the Democratic National Convention. Michigan and Florida, where the candidates said they would not campaign. Michigan, where Obama took his name off the ballot. Florida, to which Clinton flew just before the election. (Yes, I know Obama's national TV ads ran in Florida, too.)

The point is, both primaries were decidedly unfair, and do not represent the opinions of the voters or their best interests in any kind of democratic way. Thus, the only reasonable solutions are to hold new elections, with all the candidates on the ballot and campaigning, or to nullify all the votes of the two states. Logistical nightmare or voter disenfranchisement? That's a harder decision than for whom to vote, but unfair representation is worse than either. It would be a disservice to voters and a perversion of what semblance of democracy we have.

Yes, that's the other, bigger point: why can't we have a plain and simple, democratic election? In a day and age when the votes of twenty-four states can be counted and announced nationwide in under a day, I see no reason for any sort of representative election system. It obfuscates and confuses, and more significantly, misrepresents the will of the electorate.

The superdelegate system was put in place in the eighties to correct for the problems of proportional representation by district (see here for explanation), and hasn't caused huge problems yet, but it's a fundamentally flawed concept,1 as we are seeing in the very close Obama/Clinton race, in which the superdelegates may decide the election. The real solution is to abolish the compartmentalization of the electorate that caused the problem in the first place. No "winner takes all," no "proportional by district" or "by state;" just count up the votes of all of the nation's democrats and award the nomination to the candidate who gets the most votes.

Whoa! That was pretty crazy. Whoever gets the most votes wins? It's a revolutionary concept! Why has nobody thought of this before?

1I suppose from the view of the party as an organization unto itself, the idea of the group's leadership having a say in who the party's candidate is is defensible, but I, as a voter, still find it unfair. Maybe later I'll rant about how stupid the party system is in general....