Latecomers get more delegate sway

Move made to deter early primaries

WASHINGTON - South Dakota has fewer residents than Delaware, but gets the same number of delegates to the Democratic Party convention. Pennsylvania is smaller than Illinois, but will have more Democratic delegates. North Carolina is barely bigger than New Jersey, but the state will have significantly more representatives at the convention.

As the race for the Democratic nomination between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama develops into a delegate-by-delegate scramble, the contest is drawing fresh scrutiny to the party's unorthodox system of allotting delegates, including an obscure provision that gives more sway to jurisdictions that vote later in the process.

Under the rule, which was adopted last year, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and South Dakota, along with every other state remaining in the primary season, were awarded extra delegates as an inducement not to move their primary dates forward.

Those 54 "bonus" delegates would not have made any difference in past nomination contests that were effectively over by April. But now, with the candidates chasing every vote, the rules mean that jurisdictions voting in April, May, and June - eight states plus Guam and Puerto Rico - carry more weight than other states their size and may have a disproportionate effect on the outcome.

"They could end up being the decision makers," said Kathy Sullivan, the former New Hampshire Democratic chairwoman who was a member of the party's national rules committee that approved the bonus delegate plan last year. "All the states that are going late, they look brilliant now because they are going to have more delegates and a bigger say than the states that went early."

South Dakota, which votes June 3, was given one extra delegate, while Pennsylvania, which votes April 22, got seven. North Carolina, by far the biggest beneficiary of the bonus delegate system, received 24 extra seats at the convention for pushing its primary back from April to May 6 - a bonus larger than the entire delegation of some smaller states.

"We lucked out," said Kerra Bolton, a spokeswoman for the North Carolina Democratic Party. The date of the Democratic primary was mandated by state law, she said, and was not chosen to take advantage of the bonus delegates. "It was just a coincidence."

The distribution of the extra delegates appears to favor Obama, since nearly half of them are in North Carolina and Obama is expected to do well there. But their very existence would seem to help Clinton, who needs every delegate she can get to narrow Obama's lead. Clinton currently trails Obama by more than 100 delegates, with only 566 pledged delegates remaining.

Other beneficiaries of the bonus delegate system include Indiana, which votes May 6 and received six extra delegates; West Virginia, which votes May 13 and got two bonus seats; Kentucky and Oregon, both on May 20, which both got four extra delegates each; and Montana, which votes June 3 and received one extra delegate. The American territories of Guam and Puerto Rico got one and four extra delegates, respectively.

The intended outcome of the bonus system - to persuade states to push back their primaries - never materialized. States holding late votes said the availability of bonus delegates played no role in scheduling their primaries. Indeed, a spokesman for the Oregon Democratic Party, Marc Siegel, was unaware the state had been awarded extra delegates when contacted by the Globe.

The state traditionally holds a late primary, he said, and had purposely avoided moving the date forward so that it wouldn't get lost in the shuffle. "Moving [the primary] would make Oregon less relevant instead of more," he said. "Who's going to visit Oregon on Super Tuesday when they can go to one of the bigger states?"

Nick Casey, chairman of the West Virginia Democratic Party, said his state's primary date was set by the state constitution and was not affected by the bonus offer. A spokeswoman for the Indiana Democratic Party said they are holding their primary on the same date in May as the gubernatorial primary because it would have been too expensive to hold two contests. Pennsylvania has also traditionally held a later primary.

Sullivan said that the rules committee had debated whether to add the delegates, but mostly on the grounds that adding more delegates meant there would be fewer seats in the convention hall for visiting party donors and dignitaries. She said the committee had not anticipated that the change would actually have such a direct impact on the nomination process.

Most delegates are elected based on the statewide popular vote and also the popular vote within each congressional district. In the 10 jurisdictions covered by the bonus delegate rule, the additional delegates were added to the pool of statewide delegates. In some states, bonus delegates were also added to the number available in each congressional district. North Carolina, for instance, got six additional statewide delegates and 18 delegates that were distributed among the state's 13 congressional districts.

In another oddity, all but two of the states remaining in the Democratic nomination process have supported Republican presidential candidates in recent elections. Under normal rules, which allot Democratic delegates to each state based on the number of votes cast for Democratic presidential candidates in recent elections, those states would have slightly fewer delegates. But because of the bonus, those red states are in a position to send more delegates to the convention than Democratic-leaning states with similar populations that moved their primary to February.

Hans Noel, a political scientist at Georgetown University, said that the bonus delegates were unlikely to have a decisive impact on the nomination race, but he didn't rule out the possibility.

"If you do the math, I bet that these bonus delegates wouldn't be sufficient" to have a decisive impact on the contest, he said. "But anything could matter, because it's going to be close."