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Keyword: Florida and Michigan delegates

Fairness and Inclusion for Florida & Michigan Voters Email Print

Let's face it - it's unfair, undemocratic and quite preposterous for the Democratic  party to select a candidate for president without including voters from every state in the union. Now that it seems unlikely that either Florida or Michigan will have a revote for the presidential primary, the Democratic National Committee needs to move forward with a decision that empowers those states' voters without undermining DNC Rules and Bylaws and the state courts that have gotten involved in DNC's decision to strip those two states of their delegates. It's likely that no matter what the DNC does at this point they won't please everyone, but since we're seeing an unprecedented response from Democratic voters this year the DNC needs to move forward quickly to ride the wave of public engagement this primary has already engendered.  
A productive way for the DNC to validate rank-and-file voters is to find a reasonable way to reinstate their pledged delegates without seating any of those two states' superdelegates. Superdelegates are supposed to be experienced party leaders with the vision and judgment to do what is best for the Democratic party, even when it means overturning the will of the voters. Florida and Michigan's supers could have used their "superior judgment and vision" to get their states to comply with the primary plan that had already been agreed to by the DNC and their states. Yet those supers were either supportive of, or chose not to reject, the decisions to move up their states' primaries which led to the dilemma the Democratic party now faces. They may have figured their states could best influence the primary by shaping early perception of the candidates, even if it meant forfeiting their delegates. Their poor judgment last year and now their blaming of the DNC in a refusal to acknowledge their key role for this fiasco indicates they lack the vision and leadership skills required of superdelegates. To send a strong message that prevents future line-jumping by other states, the DNC is right to penalize the supers of these two states by refusing to seat them at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

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