Doing the math on the delegates
OVER LAST weekend, the 30-member Democratic Rules and Bylaws Committee struggled to extricate itself from a problem of its own making, a problem that threatened the party's ability to contest the crucial states of Michigan and Florida.
Last fall the rules committee doubled the penalty for unauthorized January primaries. Though the rules called for an automatic 50 percent reduction in delegate strength, the committee levied a discretionary 100 percent penalty - in effect, disenfranchising voters who participated in the Michigan and Florida primaries.
Last Saturday the committee almost rescued itself from this predicament by reverting to the standard 50 percent reduction. Since the GOP is also imposing a 50 percent penalty on these two strategic states, neither party will enjoy a propaganda advantage. Moreover, the rules committee avoided bitterness over decertifying delegates by agreeing to seat the full delegations, while giving each delegate half a vote.
All this worked for Florida.
What remained problematic was how to assign Michigan's 128 pledged delegates. The Democrats, unlike the Republicans, prohibit candidates from campaigning in unauthorized early primary states, on pain of losing any delegates that may subsequently be awarded.
To comply with the ban, Barack Obama and John Edwards (along with Joe Biden and Bill Richardson but not Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd, Mike Gravel, and Dennis Kucinich) voluntarily removed their names from the Michigan ballot. At the same time, according to the affidavit submitted to the rules committee by the Michigan party, Obama and Edwards supporters "organized efforts to cast votes for Uncommitted status, which received 40 percent of the votes, making it eligible for 55 delegates."
Clinton, whose name remained on the ballot, received 55 percent of the total vote without campaigning. This translates into 73 delegates. Clinton insists that the 328,000 votes cast for her be represented by 73 pledged delegates, leaving 55 for uncommitted (which as a practical matter now means Obama delegates). Obama has argued that by removing his name he has, in effect, rendered the election meaningless as a basis for apportioning delegates. He has wanted to split the delegates evenly 64-64, without reference to the votes cast.
To resolve this issue without a revote the Michigan Democratic Party turned to a committee of four that included Senator Carl Levin, ironically, one of the principal advocates of the January primary. Its plan "split the difference" between Clinton's 73-55 and Obama's 64-64 with a 69-59 assignment of pledged delegates between Clinton and Obama.
Sometime after this proposal was formally submitted, the Michiganders must have learned that the Rules and Bylaws Committee was obliged to assure that delegates fairly reflected voter preference. So Michigan State Chairman Mark Brewer presented statistics purporting to justify the 69-59 split with electoral and polling data.
The 69-59 figure, he said, took three factors into account: the nearly 600,000 votes actually cast, the 30,000 untabulated write-ins, and exit polls showing that if all the candidates' names had been on the ballot, the split between Clinton and Obama would have been 46-35 percent.
The numbers he cited, however, refute his own case. Once one remembers to subtract all but the two candidates reaching the 15 percent threshold needed to qualify for delegates, the 46-35 percent split between Clinton and Obama on exit polls, which of course include write-in voters, works out to a 57-43 percent partition of delegates - translating into the same 73-55 delegate split one would get by counting the actual votes cast.
Because of the transparency maintained by the rules committee, anyone who does the math can see that the few extra delegates assigned to Obama are impermissible under party rules - specifically 20.C.6(ii) requiring that a delegation "reflect the state's division of presidential preference and uncommitted status."
How sad all this is. There has never been a more heavily attended and widely broadcast meeting of a party rules committee. James Roosevelt Jr. and Alexis Herman presided with flawless fairness and unfailing tact.
Yet all this fine effort resulted in an insider deal vitiated by arithmetical error.
Josiah Lee Auspitz has written about party rules for several national publications.
