Florida and Michigan

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Just a quick blog since the Democratic delegates from Florida and Michigan are in the news again and whether or not they should be seated at the National Convention.

How I see it is that both states broke the DNC rules by moving their primaries ahead of Feb 5 therefore they should not be allowed to be seated at the convention. The rules should not be changed in the middle of the game. Now if they do decide to seat them I have three ideas as to how they should allow them to be seated so that they limit how much the states impact the race. Since they shouldn't be allowed to act as "king makers" at the convention after breaking the rules.
1) Give one candidate all of Florida's delegates and give the other all of Michigan's delegates. Maybe do a coin toss or something to determine who got which state.
2) Split the delegates in both states and award each candidate an equal share. The delegates get to be seated at the convention but won't drastically swing the delegate count to one candidate or the other.
3) Award the delegates in each state proportionally to each candidate's nation standing in the overall delegate count. In otherwords give the front runner slightly more delegates than the runner up.

To me these are the best solutions to this problem should the delegates from Florida and Michigan be seated. The previous election results are flawed since in Michigan only Clinton was on the ballot and in Florida niether candidate had the opportunity to campaign. Holding new elections is too costly and drastically raises the chances of election fraud especially when the money to hold new elections would most likely NOT come from the states. Privately funded elections? I think not.