Primaries
I'm gearing up to run the primary elections here in my precinct, and realized in talking to a brand-new volunteer that I don't at all understand the relationship between the Texas popular vote and the caucuses that are held as soon as the polls close. Nor did I understand whether Texas was a winner-take-all or a proportional state. It turns out there was good reason for my confusion: in an apparent attempt to wire around the Republican National Committee's rules for holding a winner-take-all primary before March 14, the Texas Republican Party put together a complicated mechanism, since modified by an RNC ruling, that . . . does something I can't quite figure out. Apparently it's mostly proportional by state district popular vote, but some at-large delegates are proportional by statewide popular vote, and there's some kind of mechanism for allocating the delegates that would have gone to anyone who was under 20% of the popular vote, but there's also some kind of special rule depending on whether the top candidate won a majority or only a plurality. I give up. Here's a link. It's Byzantine.
Yeah, that's something. At first I was thinking, "Oh, this isn't so bad, it's clear enough, there's just a threshold and then... well, no, here's another thing... but also... or... hmm."
ReplyDeleteIt's not good for a democratic Republic to have rules the voters can't understand. Hard to be sure the rules were fairly applied if almost no one can even say what they are.
What it needs is an app to apply the rules calculate the result, provided by a company whose principals have provided lots of financial support to one of the candidates.
ReplyDeleteOh, sorry, that was the other party and Iowa.
This is why elections need to be recounted until the judges and lawyers decide all the votes have been counted.
ReplyDeleteEven if that's 150% of a precinct. The voters aren't really the power brokers there, they're just harvested for their votes like livestock. Somebody else is always pulling the strings.
In the 2008 TX Demo Primary, Obama cleaned up in the caucuses, ending up with a substantially higher proportion of convention delegates than his proportion of the vote. Obama knows how to play political hardball- domestically if not internationally.
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