[Peace-discuss] if you're taking a Dem ballot tomorrow

[Ricky Baldwin]

Just fyi for those of you who (like me) had considered voting for Kucinich ANYWAY. - Ricky

Tho the gOP still has a lot of "winner take all" primaries... The Dem primary in Illinois is
considered "proportional" (caveat - it's a kind of 'severely diluted proportional' primary
nowadays):

"Seeing the WINNER-TAKE-ALL primary as unfairly reducing the input of significant minority
factions within the party in the presidential nominating process, the McGovern-Fraser reforms of
the early-to-mid 1970's successfully promoted the so-called "PROPORTIONAL" type of primary as an
alternative to be used in the Democratic Party's nomination process. In the PROPORTIONAL type of
presidential preference primary, the district delegates are apportioned among the top vote-getters
in each (usually congressional, but occasionally state legislative) district while the at-large
delegates are apportioned among the top vote-getters statewide by the percentage of the vote
received above a certain threshold (most often 15 percent: a figure actually mandated by the rules
of the Democratic Party since 1992). This is the system used by the vast majority of the states
holding presidential primaries in the Democratic Party; the Republican party (where
WINNER-TAKE-ALL primaries are still permitted) uses it in far fewer states than the Democrats and,
in the vast majority of these, the GOP usually started using the PROPORTIONAL type only because
Democrat-dominated State Legislatures of the mid-to-late 1970's passed laws forcing both parties
to use this type of presidential preference primary. The major difference between the two parties'
PROPORTIONAL primaries is in the thresholds used by the Republicans, which can vary from as much
as 20 percent or more to as little as virtually 0 percent. (as noted below, the Democrats are
currently required by party rules to use a 15 percent threshold in all their PROPORTIONAL
primaries).

THRESHOLD TO BE USED IN "PROPORTIONAL" PRIMARIES UNDER DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION RULES:

All PROPORTIONAL Primaries, used to allocate delegates to the Democratic National Convention in
proportion to the primary vote received by each presidential contender, MUST use a 15 percent
"threshold" (no more, no less) - that is, district delegates are to be allocated proportionally to
a presidential contender based on the primary vote in a given district ONLY IF that candidate has
received at least 15 percent of the primary vote in that district while at-large delegates and
pledged PLEOs (a form of "superdelegate") are to be allocated proportionally to presidential
contenders based on the primary vote statewide ONLY IF that candidate has received at least 15
percent of the statewide primary vote. However, should NO presidential candidate receive at least
15 percent of the primary vote in either a district or statewide, the threshold in such district
or statewide shall be the percentage received by the top vote-getter minus 10 percent (for
example: should there be, say, 15 contenders on the ballot of a PROPORTIONAL primary and the top
vote-getter only receives 14 percent of the vote, say, statewide - the new threshold for
allocating at-large delegates and pledged PLEOs would be 4 percent [14%-10] (not 15 percent
because no candidate would have reached that original threshold in this example) and only
candidates receiving at least 4 percent in this hypothetical instance would be allocated said
delegates proportionally)... I can only hope all this "mumbo-jumbo" is clear enough (hey, at least
I THINK I understand it!)... these "Threshold" rules are mandated for ALL Democratic PROPORTIONAL
type primaries as I have indicated above.

BONUS PRIMARY
    In the early 1980's, what would evolve into the moderate so-called "New Democrat" movement
began its challenge to the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party which had been the force
behind the McGovern-Fraser reforms of the 1970's; the second-wave Hunt "counter-reforms" of the
Democratic Party's primary process in the early 1980's reflected this struggle between factions
within the party. Several changes in the Democratic Party rules were introduced to put the brakes
on the trend toward the splintering of the party seen somewhat during the 1976 pre-Convention
period and then even more so in the 1980 nomination battle: one change which survives to the
present day was the creation of the "superdelegate" - a party functionary (U.S. Senator, Governor,
Member of Congress, State Legislative leader, Party leader, etc.) who would remain officially- if
only nominally- Uncommitted until the Convention itself had convened, thereby theoretically
bringing the perceived wisdom of the party leadership to the final choice of a nominee while still
retaining the increased influence of the party's voting rank-and-file created by the large-scale
adoption of the PROPORTIONAL primary among Democrats; this "superdelegate" survives nowadays in
the form of the Unpledged PLEO. Yet another change made in the early 1980's was the adoption of
the so-called "BONUS" type of primary. In the BONUS primary, a handful of at-large (and,
sometimes, some district) delegates are not, at first, apportioned among the presidential
contenders receiving more than the required threshold of the vote in what is otherwise a
PROPORTIONAL primary; rather, these "held-aside" delegates are later allocated to the overall
winner of the primary as a "bonus", hence the name. The proponents of this type of primary
referred to it as "Enhanced Reward" while its opponents derisively called it "Winner-take-More",
an obvious attempt to link it to the WINNER-TAKE-ALL type abandoned by the Democrats for 1976. It
was used by several states in both 1984 and 1988 until a third wave of "re-reform" sweeping the
Democratic Party banned the use of this BONUS type of primary as a method of allocating the
party's delegates beginning in 1992; there is nothing, however, to prevent the Republicans in a
given state from using a BONUS primary as the GOP does not operate its primaries under
centralized, nationwide party rules as do the Democrats.
 
LOOPHOLE PRIMARY
    The "LOOPHOLE" type of primary, in essence, is an updated version of what is the oldest form
of the Presidential Preference (as opposed to DELEGATE SELECTION) primary - dating back to when
Oregon enacted the very first statute authorizing just such a primary for the 1912 election. In
this, what is really the original form of the ADVISORY primary, there was both a presidential
preference "beauty contest" vote and a separate DELEGATE SELECTION primary held at the same time:
the voter had the opportunity to indicate a preferred candidate from among the list of names of
presidential contenders on the top ballot but actually elected the delegates to the National
Convention as individuals or on slates listed on a separate ballot directly beneath the
presidential preference one. Since the actual delegates were being elected through a separate
voting procedure, the presidential preference results were merely "advisory" giving this type of
primary its original sobriquet. In theory, the state's National Convention delegates were to throw
their support behind - and give their votes on the Convention floor to - the winner of the
presidential preference "beauty contest": however, the hopes of the early supporters of the
Presidential Primary (the majority of which were of this type) were to be dashed in presidential
election after presidential election as many a state's delegation often as not ignored the
"advice" of the state party's rank-and-file as expressed in the preference balloting. This type of
primary first got its name of "LOOPHOLE" in 1976 when many political observers and pundits
realized that, in any state still using what was - in effect - the original advisory
preference/delegate selection type of primary, it was theoretically possible for a candidate to
win all that state's delegates despite the McGovern-Fraser reforms which had outlawed the more
blatant WINNER-TAKE-ALL preference vote in favor of the PROPORTIONAL type for Democrats: all a
presidential contender had to do was to elect his slates of district and at-large delegates in the
bottom delegate selection balloting and it didn't much matter how he did in the top of the ballot
presidential preference "beauty contest" , a convenient "loophole" for getting around the
Democratic Party's ban on WINNER-TAKE-ALL primaries, hence the name - one which caught on, as it
differentiated this type of "beauty contest" primary from the ADVISORY type. The LOOPHOLE type was
banned in the Democratic primaries of 1980, but exemptions were made for Illinois and West
Virginia - a tribute to both the Cook County, Ill. Democratic machine and West Virginia Sen.
Robert Byrd, respectively, being powerful enough in national Democratic Party circles to keep
their states' "beauty contest" preference vote in place for that year; the subsequent Hunt
"counter-reforms" restored the LOOPHOLE type as legal under Democratic Party rules for 1984 and
1988 and, while the Democratic "re-reforms" effective in 1992 had sought to discourage the use of
the LOOPHOLE primary, it nevertheless survived among the Democrats in West Virginia - again,
largely due to the influence of that state's Sen. Byrd on the national party hierarchy. In 1996,
however, no Democratic primary was of the LOOPHOLE type. The GOP, meanwhile, has no national party
rules against the use of the LOOPHOLE type and a handful of states did use it for the choosing of
delegates to the Republican National Convention in 1996.
 
CAUCUS/CONVENTION
    The earliest form of delegate selection for the National Conventions is the CAUCUS/CONVENTION
system, which is still used in a few states. In this system, the voter does not choose the party's
delegates to the National Convention through the ballot, as in a Primary (where the delegates are
chosen directly by the voter or there is a presidential preference vote which determines the
allocation of delegates indirectly) but, instead, participates in a "caucus" or "mass meeting" (a
term more prevalent in the South) for the first "tier" (as the levels of civil divisions up
through the State level are usually called in the application of this method) - a convocation of
voters from a given precinct, township, ward or other relatively small civil division within a
given state and one not very unlike the traditional Town Meeting prevalent in New England. In the
archetypal "caucus", local supporters of the various presidential contenders are encouraged to
speak at the caucus about the merits of their particular candidate and, after some discussion in
the wake of these speeches, there is a vote of some sort (whether by secret ballot or by show of
hands or by actually lining up behind supporters of a preferred presidential contender in order to
be counted as being for that candidate) which determines who will go to the party meeting (usually
a bona fide Convention) for the next highest tier (the County or Congressional or Legislative
District) as a delegate from the civil division for which the caucus was held and usually having a
preference for a particular presidential contender. Each tier chooses delegates to represent it at
the party meeting (again, usually a Convention) for next tier. No matter how many tiers there are
(usually three or four all told: local civil division, County or equivalent [optional and most
often skipped in smaller states], some kind of sub-state District often larger than a County and
then the State as a whole), the last tier - the State party Convention - usually chooses the
at-large (that is, statewide) delegates to the party's National Convention while the penultimate
tier - the Convention for the level next below the State (usually some kind of sub-state District
[Congressional, Legislative, multi-county Judicial]) - chooses the state's district delegates to
the National Convention from that district. What is known today as the CAUCUS/CONVENTION was
actually originally referred to as the "primary", but when the Primary as we have come to know it
(an actual election by ballot) first came into use in the early 20th century, the old system came
to be called the "indirect primary" to differentiate itself from the newfangled "direct primary";
the term CAUCUS/CONVENTION, however, came into vogue by the 1960's to eliminate any confusion
between these two very different methods of ultimately choosing a state's delegates to a party's
National Convention. Up through the 1976 election, which accelerated the number of states holding
Primaries, the CAUCUS/CONVENTION method was the usual method for choosing delegates to the
National Convention: it was a system easily controlled - and, in many cases, manipulated - by the
party hierarchy. In the Democratic Party of the early 1970's, the McGovern-Fraser reforms -
seeking to reduce the influence of "bossism" in the nominating process - encouraged many states to
change over from this method of choosing National Convention delegates to the Primary and, since
Primaries are elections regulated by state law and the majority of statehouses in the 1970's came
to be controlled by Democrats, the GOP was also forced - by laws in the several states - to begin
turning away from the CAUCUS/CONVENTION. In 1960, there were only 16 presidential primaries: by
1980, there were 35 and, in 2000, there will be 45 presidential primaries - only 7 states will be
using the CAUCUS/CONVENTION alone in 2000 and the 40-year trend toward states using some kind of
presidential primary is very clearly seen in the statistics."

http://www.thegreenpapers.com/Definitions.html#Prop


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