The Complexity of Delegates, explained
The voting public in America is quite familiar with general election terms such as “popular vote” and the often-debated “electoral college” to elect the President of the United States. However, during primary season, the process becomes a bit more complicated.
For Super Tuesday’s Presidential Primary, statewide votes are allocated to decide how many delegates a candidate will receive. Delegates officially function as spokespeople for voters, making their choice for a candidate in July at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
California, the largest populated state in the country, accounts for a robust 415 pledged delegates (144 state-wide, 271 congressional). Those pledged delegates are distributed in a proportional process, with 33 percent allocated to state-wide delegates, and a majority, 66 percent going to congressional district delegates.
During the California Primary, a candidate must receive 15 percent of state wide or congressional districts votes to maintain their delegates. Any candidate that received less than 15 percent loses their delegates, and they have to be redirected. While state-wide delegates are proportionally reallocated to candidates with the highest totals, congressional district delegates have the freedom to choose which candidate they support at the DNC.
How do these “free agent” congressional district delegates choose candidates at the convention? One of many options is to base their final choice on dropped-out candidates’ endorsements. For example, as Senator Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg dropped out of the race within days of Super Tuesday, they pledged support for former Vice President Joe Biden. This could sway delegate votes to Biden at the convention, especially if he or Senator Bernie Sanders fail to lock up the Democratic nomination beforehand.
To make matters more complicated, California voters could wait weeks to find out the results of the primary. This is due to California allowing same day provisional ballot registrations and mail-in ballots which were able to be postmarked up until midnight of Super Tuesday.
Some states are trying to reform the primary voting process going forward. For instance, Hawaii, Kansas, Alaska, and Wyoming are using ranked-choice voting for the 2020 Democratic primaries. Ranked-choice voting allows for voters to vote for multiple candidates on a single ballot, ranking them by preference. Kat Nilsen, a Santa Monica College (SMC) student, prefers this option.
“Instead of choosing just one, you get to rank your candidates on a scale from best to worst," Nilsen said. "That way you’re not wasting your vote or doing a spoiler vote. It takes away the policy of voting for the lesser of two evils.”
Although ranked choice voting could provide an outcome more reflective of the majority of voters, there’s not enough research to guarantee it would improve the current primary process. “I believe it’s somewhat confusing, but I don’t know the ramifications of removing the delegate process,” said SMC student, Maxwell Scarlatelli.
As of today, Joe Biden currently leads Bernie Sanders in delegates, 664 to 573. These totals are bound to change, as primaries are taking place this week in Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri and Washington, along with North Dakota’s Democratic Caucus. There’s still plenty of primary delegates to be divvied up before reaching the magic number of 1,991, to clinch the nomination.