Rules changes for Dem primaries?
A very lengthy but interesting read. Suggestions are not necessarily mutually consistent.
http://www.nationofchange.org/news/2016/03/06/blue-state-bernie-and-the-dncs-plutocratic-victory-rules/
A DNC rule change could very simply abolish this undemocratic, and questionably constitutional, system. The rule change would mathematically discount the weight of votes of rotten borough states. Currently, the weight of a delegation’s vote is based on their theoretical contribution to the electoral college. One factor is the variable number of electoral votes in each state. The adjustment would be determined on the basis of the actual historic, not theoretical, contribution to Democratic membership in the Electoral College. Voters made irrelevant by state law because they are insufficient in number to support a single elector should not be allowed to dilute the voting strength of delegates from states that do reliably send electors to the College. In an Electoral College system, electors should be the determining factor for awarding equal representation in the nominating Convention, not individual voters.
The new formula would end the false pretense that, since a nominating Convention necessarily precedes an election, blue state delegates must suspend disbelief that red state delegates represent anything but a rotten borough devoid of any remote prospect for delivering essential Democratic electors.
Drafting and enforcing such a rule banning discrimination against blue and purple state voters is simple. The Electoral College results in the previous election provides the most relevant evidence whether any potential electors are resident in any state. The voting strength of a state determined by its number of electors should be cut by 50% if the state produced no electoral votes in the previous election. The remaining 50% weighted voting strength would be reduced a further 20%, 15% 10% and 5% for each previous election where no Democratic electors show up in the state, for a full generation back in time. Voting strength declines to zero if a state has contributed no Democratic electoral vote in the last 20 years – which is longer than the lifetime of the youngest born-bankrupt Millennial. A 20-year missing persons statute of limitations would thus run on any continuing pretense that prospective electors are likely to show up in a rotten borough state, and, therefore, should be represented based on that fiction at the next Convention. This adjustment of voting strength would apply to every deep red state named above that Clinton won and is currently being promoted as supporting her “victory.” The case against counting such red state delegates is even stronger in the Plains States that Sanders won, which have furnished Democratic electors only once in eighty years.
The DNC should stop the pretense Clinton won anything in these red states by stripping voting rights from delegates representing rotten boroughs. In a democratically organized primary system her “big victory” would thus add up to zero delegates, and she would have to concentrate her triumphal celebrations on that one delegate victory in Massachusetts.
To repeat one last time, when the only rational conclusion is that no Democratic electors live in a state, since they have not shown up at the Electoral College for a generation, then that state should have no voting delegates at the nominating Convention. Giving voting power for non-existent electors only serves to unfairly dilute the voting power of those states where Democratic electors have resided and voted for more than a generation, or even two, in the case of Minnesota.
To give delegates votes where they represent no electors is no different than enfranchising a rotten borough. Aside from being inherently undemocratic by treating unequals as equal, rotten boroughs have always been more prone to corruption and manipulation by powerful interests.
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