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

[John W.]

At 02:20 PM 2/4/2008, Ricky Baldwin wrote:

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

So what's your point, lad?  You know how confused I get by election 
law.  Are you saying that if we vote for Kucinich and he doesn't get more 
than 15% of the vote...what?  What will happen?  I don't understand this 
crap.  Put it in plain English in two or three sentences.

John Wason



>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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