Their State Central Committees have to submit a plan and a petition to the DNC for authority to conduct a new delegate selection process. The Plan has to conform to the delegate selection rules in The Call. Then the DNC’s Rules Commission would look at the plan for the do-over, and approve/disapprove. My guess is they would also force Florida and Michigan to void the rule breaking outside the window primary results for purposes of selecting national delegates — taking it out of the hands of the Convention Committees. Once DNC agrees to a new plan, then the state party has to finance it.

So — has anyone in Michigan or Florida heard about an emergency meeting of the State Central Committee? That is where it begins.

As to Caucuses — Most folk in Minnesota who are interested in Politics, really appreciate our caucus tradition. We do have party rules that allow for some absentee participation, and we have a state law that prohibits many kinds of public meetings on caucus night. (We require the DFL and R’s to caucus at the same time, because we don’t have party ID on our registeration to vote — this keeps R’s out of DFL business on the theory you can’t be in two places at the same time.)

By the way, apparently the DNC will approve on line voting with certain security features for a caucus — it is, apparently a two step process, you register for the caucus, and then on election day, night, whatever, you vote online. Some on our State Central looked into it a year or so ago when they were working on the MN Call — and while it was not adopted, many wanted to look into it further. But many of us also believe there is huge value in a Real Political Meeting where things are actually debated face to face.

Early voting in a primary is not all that great either, as many who voted for candidates that weren’t running by the primary time have discovered.

Maybe if they had a system where you could vote early in case you couldn’t make it to the poll, but you also could have a second or third choice in case your candidate dropped out. It doesn’t seem to be as bad for a regular election as the candidates don’t usually drop out.

My solution would be to provide for absentee ballots for the caucus wherein people could indicate, by rank order, their choices. The absentee ballots would count for 40 per cent of the vote, leaving the ïn-person voters with 60 per cent of the vote.

Um-hmmm.

http://www.horsesass.org/

Huckabee & Paul have a case.

I think the DNC should pay for us to do a caucus.

I agree. I wish that could happen. I have two questions.

1) You really know the players and the dynamics that led up to the situation in Michigan. Do you think given Dingell’s push (and I suppose) the legislature who signed off on going early, that DNC could have done a better job or anything to stop it–and in retrospect if you could wave a wand and have had this problem not happen what should have been done–just Michigan holding the caucus I guess it would have been instead of a primary when DNC had it scheduled or Michigan had it originally schueduled.

2) Also how do you feel about the idea of regional elections so that there is not the compression dynamic and problem of compressing all these states early on where different regions take turns going first each 4 year cycle as expressed in this editorial:

Let It Start Now: Regional Primaries