The Voting Booth | Should delegates decide the primary?

Allison Good Columnist

Delegate this, superdelegate that; isn’t it enough to have to deal with the Electoral College? Apparently not, because the process of choosing presidential candidates is very complicated, and those involved often refuse to play by the rules.

After each primary, the media releases new statistics on the number of delegates for each candidate. This, however, is no indicator of the crucial vote that will occur at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in the fall. We want to believe we can quantify and predict a candidate’s success or failure according to the number of delegates they have earned, but a logical process doesn’t yet exist.

The Democratic and Republican parties have two types of delegates. The first type is the pledged delegate, who is elected on both the state and local levels by the party. He or she is committed to supporting the party’s candidate at the forthcoming convention. Delegates usually vote for the candidate who wins the popular vote in their state.

But here it can get tricky, and according to the upstanding political blog politico.com, the “pledge” is merely a myth. Politico writes that it has been “an open secret in the [Democratic] party for years” that when pledged delegates attend the Convention, they are not required to vote for the candidate they voted for in the primaries. So if a pledged delegate voted for Hillary Clinton in February, he or she can just as well vote for Barack Obama in the summer. Herein lies the potential for corruption, because it is quite easy to use unethical campaign methods, such as bribes, to win delegates.

The second type of delegate is the Democratic unpledged delegates or the Republican superdelegates, who are commonly called just superdelegates. These are the bigshots who don’t have to go to the ends of the earth to please the party in order to be a delegate. They consist of all of the party’s head honchos, including governors, congressmen, former speakers of the House, presidents, vice presidents and convention chairs. Bill Clinton and Al Gore, for example, will be superdelegates in the 2008 Democratic National Convention, along with Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy.

Superdelegates do not have to declare allegiances before the Convention and have the luxury of not having to compete for delegate status. Since the primaries have so far yielded an almost-stalemate in terms of Obama and Clinton’s delegates, most speculate that the superdelegates will determine the party’s candidate.

Fortunately, the Republican party does not face as severe a problem. John McCain has emerged as the clear front-runner with a grand total of 918 delegates, while opponent Mike Huckabee only has 217.
Obama leads the Democratic pack with 1,319 delegates, while Clinton falls short with 1,250.

However, while Obama has more delegates, Clinton controls more superdelegates. The problem, though, is that in order to be elected as the Democratic presidental candidate, either Clinton or Obama must receive at least 2,025 delegate votes at the Convention.

I am a firm believer in the value of the popular vote, but it seems that this idea has no place in the presidential election on either the primary or general level. Sure, the delegates may tend to vote according to the people, but they can still switch that allegiance even an hour prior to the Convention vote. These delegates are elected, but not by the populace.

The Electoral College scandal of 2000 showed us that this hierarchy doesn’t work the way the general population wishes, and several politicians have called for reforming the College. The delegate system has yet to erupt in scandal, but this could easily change with the 2008 conventions, since several news sources have now exposed the shortcomings of the system.

We all hope that the candidates we admire will not go to extremes to woo delegates, but I would not put it past them—this is a highly contested election with a lot hanging in the balance. The delegate system does not make sense to the average American, and the sensible person would insist on the authority of the popular vote. So go ahead, vote in the primaries, but keep in mind that your vote may not count in the long run.

—Allison Good ’11 is writing a weekly column about American politics, focusing on the 2008 presidential election and the primary process.