The Real Problem with Michigan and Florida
Jun 2nd, 2008 by nick
It looks like Michigan’s and Florida’s delegates to the Democratic National Convention will be seated after all, but with ½ a vote each.
There are several problems with this compromise. First, because Barack Obama wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan, they’ve basically had to guess how many delegates to assign to him. Second, the candidates didn’t campaign in those states because they were told at the time that the vote wouldn’t count. More importantly, the individuals voting in those states believed their votes wouldn’t count! We can’t just pretend that a retroactive count now is indicative of the actual will of the voters in those states had their votes counted from the beginning. Who knows how the vote would have gone had the candidates campaigned and the voters voted knowing their votes would count?
As serious as those flaws are with this compromise, the root of the problem is really the annoying primary schedule that favors certain states like Iowa and New Hampshire by allowing them to schedule their votes before other states. The reason that Michigan and Florida were originally penalized was that they held their votes too early, in violation of the apparently sacrosanct position of Iowa, New Hampshire, and others. If we had a one-day national primary, or at least did away with the obnoxious state ordering rules, none of these problems would have occurred. In my opinion, Michigan and Florida should never have been penalized in the first place for scheduling their primaries when they wanted to schedule them.