"My vote didn't matter"

[mmcirvin]

I've heard several people who voted in lopsided Democratic primaries say that their vote didn't matter anyway because the contest in their state was so uneven.

I think they're thinking of the general election, in which electors in every state except Maine and Nebraska are seated winner-take-all. But primaries and caucuses are not necessarily like this. In the Democratic Party, the primaries and caucuses are all proportional: delegates are apportioned according to how many votes their candidates got, as long as the votes are over a minimum threshold. Some of the Republican primaries and caucuses are like that too, though some others are winner-take-all.

Of course, it's still true that the chance that your personal vote will make the difference between N and N+1 delegates for your candidate is pretty low. But there's nothing special about lopsided contests in a Democratic primary that will keep your vote from counting, unless it's so lopsided that your candidate gets almost no votes (or almost all the votes).

(Now, if you're speaking from Florida or Michigan, that's another story...)

Comments

[jwgh]

Rhode Island's primary is next month, so I have a little while before my vote will count yet.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Yes, you know, they took away our delegates in Florida. Combine that w/ Edwards dropping out and I just couldn't bring myself to vote. It's the first time since I was 18 that I didn't vote in a primary.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

You know Hillary Clinton is trying to get the delegates seated anyway, right?

The DNC's angling for some sort of do-over, maybe a caucus. Something like that is probably the least worst outcome at this point. Nobody in the party leadership seems to want a convention fight.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Yes, I read she was trying to do that. I think she won Florida anyway, so that makes sense.

[smashingstars.livejournal.com]

I wish Kansas had a primary instead of a caucus. Caucuses are stupid. There, I said it.

[reverendluke.livejournal.com]

I think they're thinking of the general election, in which electors in every state except Maine and Nebraska are seated winner-take-all.

While it is technically true that Nebraska, theoretically, at least, will split electors, if you vote for the Not Republican, your vote still probably doesn't count. Nebraska has all of five electoral votes, and one each goes to whomever wins each of our three congressional districts. The other two go to whomever wins the majority of those. District 2 (or as we call it "Omaha" or "The Part of Nebraska with People") is occasionally contentious, but the rest of the state goes 75-25 to the Republicans every single election. So, at best, a Not Republican could theoretically pick up one extra elector under our current system. Whoopee!

Also, I'm registered independent, so I can't vote in the primary anyway. Also also, the Nebraska Democratic party decided to have a caucus this year so the primary is (for the Dems, at least) just for show anyway.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Washington State had its caucuses today (2/9), and will have a primary next weekend. With me so far?

Okay, the Democrats have decided to split their delegates according to the caucus results and ignore the outcome of the primary. Dems will have 80 delegates plus 17 super-delegates who are party officials. The primary was created by voter initiative in '89, and the DPWA has consistently ignored its results as far as determining its delegates. (Therefore, when the GOP nominee is uncontested in 2004, the primary is cancelled by a new law created for the occasion.)

Republicans will have 40 delegates (of whom 3 are super-delegates) and of the remainder, 19 will be allocated by primary, and 18 will be allocated by the caucuses. (They've been tinkering with the vote-split every election.) At the primary, you vote the candidate. At the caucuses, you elect delegates.

I was on IRC on the night of Super Tuesday, trying to explain this to a foreigner and.. I couldn't. The National process just couldn't be summarized, and it's hard to get some foreigners to understand the level of autonomy our states have.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The states have a lot of autonomy, and the parties have a lot of autonomy (this bit is not so unusual), and the state party organizations have a lot of autonomy, and still the parties and the state governments are tangled up inextricably in the primary process, which is the thing that really weirds foreigners out. The idea of declaring a party when you register to vote strikes them as just bizarre—sometimes they interpret this as meaning you have to tell the government who you're going to vote for before you do it, because they think of party preference in terms of voting for a party in a general election.

The 2000 election got people thinking about reforming the election process in various ways, with not always good results, but at least it got them thinking about it. I'm hoping the closeness of the Democratic primary race will get the Democratic Party to do some long-overdue thinking about how they select presidential candidates. But there are so many interested parties pulling in so many different directions. The system that exists now is to some extent a reaction to the chaos in 1968.