March 29, 2008
Prepare Yourself »
Ha, so now you all know what a super delegate is. Well, you know there’s something called a super delegate and that they are going to “steal your democracy”. Either way, this should now prove I am always right and not to be trifled with.
Some of you may be getting sick of the primary coverage … but enjoy it while it lasts. Once it’s over we have endless months of hearing about “The Undecided Voter”, which is news talk for “Disengaged, knowledgeless fuckwit who can’t be bothered to pay attention to what’s going on in the country for 46 out of the 48 months in a presidential election cycle”.
You can use mouth breather as shorthand.
January 14, 2008
I Saw You »
One of my favorite things in the world are I Saw You ads in newspapers. So romantic, yet at the same time so desperate.
I’ve thrown together an RSS feed of I Saw You ads from the Portland Mercury, one of Portland’s local alternative weeklies. Enjoy!
January 09, 2008
The Primaries are the New Electoral College »
First, let’s review.
The 2000 presidential debacle educated/reminded most of the country that the President of the United States is not elected by popular vote. Instead, each state is given a certain number of seats in the electoral college. Each state gets two for free, and then extra seats are assigned based on population. The dolling out of electors matches the dolling out of federal congress members.
When you’re voting for president, you’re actually voting for a slate of electors who have pledged to vote for a particular candidate. After the election, these electors are bound by state law to vote for the candidate they’ve pledged to vote for. Unless (in 2008) you’re talking about Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, or West Virginia. These states don’t have any laws about who an elector has to vote for.
Also, if you were playing attention, you’ve realized that states could pass a law saying their electors have to vote for a specific candidate. Florida threatened to do this in 2000. They could also pass a law that says each elector has to jerk off over a newspaper with pictures of all the candidates and whomever ends up with the most electoral sperm+cowpers fluid on their photo gets the vote. Women have to blow their husbands and then spit on the newspaper. Dykes and single women (no difference in politics) can vote for whomever, so long as they make out in front of the legislature.
That last bit of crassness was to prepare your brain for the primary process.
The Primaries
The primaries are similar to the electoral college. Each party in each state holds some kind of event (primary or caucus) to select delegates who are committed to a particular candidate. These delegates will get together at a convention in the summer and vote for who the presidential candidate is.
The above, of course, is akin to describing sex as “one day you start growing public hair and then a few years later you’re naked, tied to the radiator with pantyhose and waiting for that sweet thing you met at the bar to get back with the condoms and your wallet”.
Who Can Vote
How we got to hold primaries and caucuses is a long drawn out story that I don’t know. The high school history story says primaries and caucuses were invented to keep the bosses of the political party from just picking a candidate without the input of actual party members.
So in the beginning, Republicans could vote in the Republican primaries, and Democrats could vote in the Democratic primaries. This is what’s now known as a closed primary/caucus. Independents are left out in the cold, unless they change party affiliation.
In more recent years, facing the realities of an entrenched two party system, some states decided to let their Independent voters pick a primary to vote in. This is known as a modified primary/caucus. Other states completely opened their primary systems so that you could pick which primary it was you’d be voting in, regardless of your party affiliation. This is known as an open primary/caucus.
The whole open and modified primary business is still being hashed out, and changes from year to year. In some states choosing to vote in another party’s primary may change your affiliation, and some states with open primaries the parties are allowed to make a separate count of votes cast by registered party members. It gets really complicated really fast, so I’m going to let the experts over at The Green Papers give you the run down.
Who gets the Delegates
Moving on from that cluster fuck, once all the voting is done who gets the delegates? Is it winner take all like the electoral college? No, and what I’m about to go over is probably the most convincing argument for leaving the electoral college as it is.
So, each state has different rules for how the delegates get doled out. In addition, each party doles out the delegates differently.
First, there’s a winner-take-all primary. This is pretty straight forward. Just like the electoral college, if you win a state, you get all the delegates. Even if it’s 50.2% to 49.7%, the winner takes home all the delegates. The Democrats stopped doing this in the late 60s, but it’s still common in Republican primaries.
Next, there’s a proportional primary, which is what most of the Democratic primaries use, as well as some Republican states. The high level version of this says, if candidate A gets 40% of the votes and candidates B and C get 30% of the votes, then candidate A gets 40% of the delegates, while B and C get 30% of the delegates. Pretty straight forward, so of course there’s more to the story. Namely, thresholds.
Threshold rules say “in order to get any delegates, a candidate must receive at least XX% of the vote. This number is fixed at 15% for Democratic proportional primaries, and varies somewhere between 0% - 20% for the Republican proportional primaries. There’s also different rules surrounding per district delegates and “at-large” (statewide) delegates. I’m not even going to try and describe this, and will leave it to the Green Papers again.
Some states that run caucuses (see below), will also run a advisory primary, where voters get to go out and vote for a candidate, but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s meant to let the caucus goers know what the state electorate thinks, but is 100% non-binding.
One last bit of nonsense. In the old days, you’d vote twice on primary day. The first vote would be cast for a specific delegate in your district. The second vote would be an advisory vote on who you wanted that delegate to vote for. The delegate, of course, could then vote for whomever he (it was the old days) wanted to at the convention. This was the original advisory primary, but is now called (for obvious reasons) a loophole primary. The practice has been stamped out in Democratic Primaries, but if you’re a Republican and live in Illinois or Pennsylvania, your primary vote is essentially worthless.
Delegates in Caucuses
Caucuses are not primaries, and no delegates to the national convention are selected. Even in Iowa. What gets selected at each of the local caucuses are representatives to a second, less regional caucus. This caucus selects delegates for an even higher tier caucus. This goes on until eventually delegates to a state-wide convention are selected, and this convention selects the delegates to the national convention.
One more Delegate Gotcha
One more thing. There are also a bunch of delegates who, going into a convention, aren’t required to vote for any particular candidate. I don’t know how these hacks get selected, but I imagine it involves an amount of cocaine equivalent to the weight of Juan Valdez’s donkey, cubed. This year about 25% of the Democratic delegates can vote as they please, and about 29% of Republicans.
Outside Delegate Reading
Again, you can find more detail on the Green Papers website. Here’s a full description of each primary type, as well as a description of the caucuses.
You can also get a state-by-state breakdown of the primary type and voter eligibility in each state for both the Democrats and Republicans.
You can also get a breakdown of which delegates are pledged to a particular candidate and which ones can vote for whomever they please come convention time for each party.
Why 2008 is Even Screwier
There’s been a frenzy this time around for states to push up the date of their primaries. The public spin here is the states in question can be more influential early on in the election rather than holding their primaries after everything has been decided and the opposition candidates have dropped out.
The problem is, there are party rules as to WHEN certain states can hold their primaries. A few states broke these rules, and have been punished by loosing delegates.
Specifically, the Republicans have punished Florida, New Hampshire, Michigan, South Carolina, and Wyoming for moving their primaries up too soon by striping each state of half their delegates.
The Democrats took similar steps with Michigan and Florida, except the punishment was harsher. These states lost all their delegates. This means voters will get to vote earlier … but their vote won’t mean anything.
This, I think, is the most interesting part of this presidential season. There’s probably a pulitzer out there for the reporter that can ferret out why these states actually made such an on-the-surface boneheaded move (I’m not holding my breath). Our state legislatures are full of hacks, but they’re political hacks who clearly knew what the result of moving the primaries would be.
Was is simply pandering to the moron voters? Were they acting on behest of party bosses to remove or reduce the influence of their own states? Was it an attempt to suppress voter turnout? All of the above?
I’ve also heard it whispered that these states may have their delegates reinstated at the convention, which is interesting for a lot of reasons. That’s 366 delegates up for grab for the Democrats, and 136 delegates up for the Republicans. If the impossible happens and there’s no clear candidate going into either convention, things could get ugly really fast around these missing delegates.
The Point
If I have a point to all this, it’s that no one on TV or the radio talks about these things. It’s all about momentum and who looks like a winner. Looking at the Democratic delegate count after Iowa and New Hampshire, Obama has 25 delegates, Clinton has 24 Delegates and Edwards has 18. The two states also have a combined 20 delegates who are un-pledged.
This means if the the convention were held with only the votes from those two states, the party hacks would get to decide who the candidate was by bribing those 20 delegates with favors, vice, and blackmail.
Rock that Vote Kids, Rock it Hard.
December 24, 2007
Nerding out on XMAS Eve »
Nerding out, testing some things. Keep on eye on the Latest Nerd Talk links for a small project release.
July 21, 2007
internet trends »
So, I’ve given in and decided to start using twitter. I signed up for an account a while back but never found a use for it but the whole “I got an iPhone thing” made me decide to give it another go. I R Intorweb Trend Whore.