Tag: Election reform

Election reform is one of the most important issues facing our country and our world right now, even if it doesn’t get the coverage of torture or abortion.  The way that we run our elections and initiative processes determines who makes policy, the type of policy made, and the tone of our political discourse.  If we ignore it or take advantage of the electoral system, we our doing ourselves and our country a disservice.

This week:  Voter ID bill (aka poll tax) foiled in Texas by Democrats, corrupt Bush officials leading the charge for unsafe online voting, instant runoff voting’s failures, Ralph Nader accuses Terry McAuliffe of bribery, McAuliffe’s history of disenfranchising voters, FOX lies about Eric Holder, and more!

Have you heard the reasons why many people believe Prop 8 passed this past November?  It’s the bigoted voters, say some, and they can’t be trusted!  It was a failed campaign by the gay community, say others.  And others still say it was the huge amount of money spent by out-of-state players like the Mormon Church.

But all of those explanations are ignoring an essential part of the story of how the initiative passed.  In light of the upcoming California Supreme Court ruling, I thought I’d tell you about the missing part of the Prop 8 story.

Crossposted at Dailykos.com and Congressmatters.com

Everybody’s very intrepidly attempting to conjure the current delegate count. Of course, the problems with Superdelegates, Florida, and Michigan make it difficult to decide which standards apply, but there seem to be more different totals than applicable standards.

CNN has it at Barack Obama 1262, Hillary Clinton 1213.

Jerome Armstrong has a pledged count of Clinton 1127, Obama 1119, with Superdelegates at Clinton 240, Obama 140.

Covering different bases, MSNBC has Obama at 1078, 1128, or 1306, with Clinton at 969, 1009, or 1270.

The New York Times has Obama 934, Clinton 892, and also gives the AP count of Obama 1275, Clinton 1220.

Real Clear Politics has Obama 1302, Clinton 1235.

The Washington Post gives Obama 1280, and Clinton 1218.

Confused yet?

And while I thank everyone who is trying to figure this out, the real story, as usual, is not even being discussed; the question is this: if all these intelligent, assiduous efforts are coming up with so many different results, how screwed up is the Democratic Party’s nominating system? We’re talking about a presidential election, and we’re talking about an in-house effort. This can’t be blamed on hanging chads, butterfly ballots, Diebold or Katherine Harris.

Given the level of vitriol and distrust that is poisoning the partisans of both candidates’ camps, wouldn’t a clear, transparent system of determining who is actually winning, and by how much, be of some benefit? This is a mess. This is the Democratic Party’s mess! Whoever wins this nomination, the DNC needs to radically reorganize the process. It might even be a good idea to make the results explicitly based on the clearly counted total of the popular vote. At this point, we don’t even know for sure what that total is.