Delegates

"What is delegate? Who are these people? What roles do they play in the primary elections?" My Asian friends often asked me these questions. I also ask the same questions to myself. For a foreign student, the existence of delegates seems so bizarre. In most Asian countries, the winner is the one who has the highest votes—just that simple. But in America, the winner is the one who has the most delegates, even thought he or she might have fewer votes than other candidates.

Everyone can check Wikipedia about the job of delegates. Here, I want to emphasize their role in the primary elections. As I just said, the winner who has the most delegates in the primary elections becomes the party's nominee for the presidential election. How to count the number of delegates for each candidate? It is extremely complex, especially for the Democratic Party. For the Republican Party, winner gets all the delegates. But for the Democrats' delegate-allocation system (my professor said this is the "democratic way," not "Democrats' way"), which awards votes based on how well each candidate did statewide and in each congressional district, the delegate count might need several days.



According to Time magazine, Clinton and Obama each needs at least 2,025 delegates to win nomination. And now everyone is talking about superdelegates. Who are these people? Well, these guys are the "unpledged delegates" who can ignore the preferences of Democratic voters and decide the nominee by themselves. Because Obama and Clinton now each has 600 to 800 delegates, the final winner might be decided by that 796 superdelegates, not by voters.


It is not just Democrats' nightmare, but democracy's nightmare.