How good, really, is the case for excluding Florida? [View All]

So let’s start with the observation that, barring some huge and unexpected event, neither candidate can realistically win the nomination without the help of a fair number of super-delegates. This in turn means that a lot of what’s left to be done in this race consists of making moral arguments to super-delegates to garner support.

One of these arguments, and the argument obviously favored by the Obama camp, says that super-delegates are obligated to support whoever amasses the most pledged-delegates. That a pledged-delegate lead, however small, reflects the will of the Democratic electorate and that to vote for anyone but the pledged-delegate leader would be to overturn the will of the people.

But another, quite plausible position insists that super-delegates are, instead, obligated to support whichever candidate leads in the popular vote. There’s a strong case to be made for the claim that the popular vote reflects the will of the Democratic electorate far better than pledged-delegate tallies (though I’m going to leave that case for another entry), and if super-delegates want to avoid overturning the popular will, they should look the popular vote tallies in making their decision.

And while Obama currently leads on both of these metrics, it’s http://www.realclearpolitics.com/horseraceblog/chooseyourown.html">certainly within the realm of possibility, depending on which votes are counted, for Hillary to overtake Obama in the popular vote. Importantly, if Florida’s votes are counted, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/democratic_vote_count.html">Hillary finds herself only 400,000 votes behind, and that’s nothing that couldn’t be overcome with an Ohio-like victory in Pennsylvania (Ohio, after all, netted Hillary 200,000 votes) and decent performance in other states. (That said, I think the popular vote is Hillary’s only realistic path to victory. If she doesn’t win that, although she may stay in the race, it’ll be impossible for her to win.)

So let’s take a look at the sort of case that can be made for counting Florida’s votes in the popular vote tally (and, conversely, the sort of case that can be made for excluding those votes).

Arguments for Inclusion:

• Individual Florida voters aren’t responsible for the primary dates and deserve a voice in the process. Even if Florida behaved badly in moving its primary date forward, most Floridians had nothing to do with the date of their primary. To silence the voices of all Floridians as punishment for the actions of their legislature is collective punishment, and is just as morally problematic here as it is when practiced by the Israelis against the Palestinians. Moreover, punishing people by taking away their votes is already morally problematic when done to felons, and is even more so when done to largely innocent Floridians.
  
  
• Florida votes reflect the will of Florida voters. The rational being urged on super-delegates here has the following structure:
  
  Vote Results -–act as evidence for>--> Popular Will -–which creates>--> Moral Obligation on Super-Delegates
  
  Note that nothing in the chain above is obviously broken by the misbehavior of the Florida legislature. The election held in Florida still creates legitimate evidence of popular will, and popular will still creates a moral obligation on super-delegates. The fact that Florida broke DNC rules simply isn’t relevant to a "popular will" line of reasoning. Super-delegates have no good reason to cite the behavior of the Florida legislature as an excuse to disregard the votes of Florida citizens.
  
  
• Florida is a swing state, and it doesn’t help us in November to disenfranchise them now. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2008/04/the_line_these_states_in_play.html">Obama already has serious problems against McCain in Florida and if Floridians think that Obama won the nomination by silencing their voices it’s going to be hard to win them back over to our side. We go a long way towards healing those wounds if we at least count their votes into our popular vote.

Arguments for Exclusion:

• Counting Florida’s votes will change the rules mid-game. The Florida legislature moved its primary forward against the rules and the DNC decided to strip them of their delegates as punishment. Both candidates have been operating under the assumption that Florida’s election wouldn’t count and they might have behaved differently had they known the rules would change. Counting the votes would thus be unfair to both candidates (even if Hillary would like it).
  
  Reply: The argument given here displays a misunderstanding of both the DNC’s actions and the popular-will arguments being made.
  
  The argument misinterprets the DNC’s decision to conclude that the DNC stripped the state of all of it’s relevance in the nominating process. In fact, while the DNC stripped the pledged-delegates from Florida there simply are no rules declaring that the Florida’s votes should not count in the popular vote tally (partially because there is no "official" tally). Moreover, DNC rules allow super-delegates to vote as they wish, meaning that there are no DNC rules requiring super-delegates to exorcise Florida’s votes from their moral calculus.
  
  Furthermore, the argument misinterprets the moral reasoning being urged on super-delegates when popular-will is referenced. As noted above, there never have been rules governing the way super-delegates can vote. This means that super-delegates are urged to vote on the basis of some metric (e.g. popular vote or pledged delegate leads), there simply are no rules to change.
  
  
• Because of the DNC’s decision, neither candidate campaigned in Florida. Moreover, many voters stayed home under the impression that their vote wouldn’t count. The election results are thus flawed and fail to be good evidence for popular will. Since Florida’s votes only link into the popular will argument via their value as an indicator of popular will, this fact severs the link and justifies excluding their vote.
  
  Reply: Arguments of this sort are by far the best justifications for excluding Florida’s votes from the popular vote tally, but even this argument suffers from obvious flaws.
  
  Importantly, in every national election there are states which match the description above and yet we still consider the national popular vote tally including those states morally significant. For example, in the 2000 election Gore almost certainly declined to campaign seriously in Montana and Utah while Bush almost certainly declined to campaign in Vermont and California. Nonetheless, we consider the fact that Gore won the popular vote morally significant, even though the popular vote total includes those states.
  
  Furthermore, it’s likely that people in those states may have stayed home on the assumption that their vote was unlikely to change the outcome. Again, we nonetheless find Gore’s popular vote victory significant.
  
  Finally, there are other states in the current primary that no one wants to exclude from the popular vote but which neither candidate campaigned in. For example, it’s unlikely that Hillary ran seriously in Illinois or that Obama campaigned seriously in New York. Nonetheless, there don’t seem to be many cries to throw out the 600,000 extra votes picked up by Obama in Illinois.

Conclusion:

The case for excluding Florida’s votes, thus, seems in many ways rather weak. While there are always inadequacies in any voting system, excluding Florida’s votes from the popular vote tally seems to create more problems than it solves.

(Finally, before anyone responds. I’d like to stress once again that we’re talking about the popular vote tally here. I’m not making an argument for seating Florida’s pledged delegates.)

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