Those Rogue States

There are many many problems with all of these efforts to seat the Michigan and Florida delegates.

1. First and foremost in my mind, Florida and Michigan were stripped of their delegates because they moved up their primary dates in order to wield more power in the election process. Redoing the votes in both of those states would give them - guess what? - more power in the election process. We really should not be rewarding both of these states for their refusal to play by the established rules. Side note: in terms of delegates, it's pretty clear that redoing the votes in MI and FL wouldn't really resolve anything due to the proportional allocation thing the Dems are doing. See this post for a really awesome summary of the whys and hows of a revote.
2. Florida's Republican governor (Charlie Crist) has proposed a mail-in primary as a mechanism for the revote. This is an absolutely horrendous idea. The eyes of the USA and the entire world will be focused on Florida, and they're going to experiment with an untried format that is absolutely screaming out for voting irregularities and fraud? The end result of a statewide mail-in primary is most likely pure chaos, bickering, and lawsuits which would play out during and after the actual convention. This nightmare scenario probably explains why a Republican governor floated the idea.
   
3. Michigan Senator Carl Levin briefly floated the idea of a mail-in caucus (on one of the Sunday talkies, I think it was This Week). Again - crappy idea for the above stated reasons. Also, how in the hell do you administer a mail-in caucus??? I thought the whole concept of a caucus was a town hall style gathering of people that voted in blocs for a candidate? How do you do that via a mail-in ballot? With the stakes so high in this election, Michigan is going to get cute and try something like this? It smells to high heaven. I'm an Obama supporter and know that caucuses tend to favor him, but this idea still doesn't sit well with me.

Yikes, so what to do? I don't see this ending gracefully. My own personal feeling is just split the delegates and endure the howling that is sure to come from Clinton. Sure a split gives the advantage to Obama, but that probably negates the advantage that Clinton gained from leaving her name on the MI ballot to begin with.

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