Monday, March 24, 2008

What's fair for Michigan and Florida?

The AP is running a story on the problems that Hillary Clinton is facing for the Michigan and Florida primary votes. The problem is this:

Both states held primaries so early in the year that it violated party rules, and those states were stripped of their delegates at the Democratic national convention. As a result Obama and several other candidates removed their names from the ballots and all of the candidates agreed not to campaign there. Now, the nationwide vote tallies are so close they're looking to see whether or not the votes in those primaries are going to be counted. None of the options look particularly appealing.

The Clinton camp had initially suggested that the votes were to be counted as is, which would not be fair, since Obama was not on the ballot in either state.

The Obama camp has suggested that they split the votes down the middle, which isn't fair either, because Clinton was expected to lead in those states even if he was on the ballot.

State Democratic leaders in Michigan proposed a do-over primary, but the bill has received little enthusiasm and has not been picked up by the state Senate. Florida's prospects look even worse.

The Clinton camp has suggested a mail-in re vote, but the Obama camp has raised concerns (legitimate, in my mind) about the security impacts of that.

So, I'd like to hear from my readers, what approach do you think is best? In the comments on an earlier article, one of my friends expressed disgust with the current state of the votes. In private, he'd suggested that the DNC should apologize to those states and pay for a new primary for both of them.

I'm on the other end of the spectrum. While I would agree that the rules that led the DNC to strip these states of their votes are unfair and need to be changed, I believe that these states knew exactly what they were doing when they moved their primaries up. Even though those states lost their delegates, they moved their primaries forward so that their states would be more influential in the nomination process by getting in early, and expected to heavily influence the nomination in exchange for additional attention from the nominees. The fact that this little strategy backfired gets no sympathy from me. As a member of one of the latest voting states in the union, I'm wondering why these states get should two votes to my one? Whether or not their votes counted towards the number of delegates awarded is irrelevant to me - these states did what they did because their votes were relevant to influencing public opinion of the two candidates.

I realize, however, that I'm probably alone in that view.

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