IPS-English POLITICS-US: Florida Could Be Back in the Delegates Game Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 11:40:30 -0700 Mark Weisenmiller TAMPA, Florida, May 29 (IPS) - With just three relatively small primaries left in the protracted Democratic nominating race, the party's national leadership and the Florida Democratic Party (FDP) are still debating whether or not to count votes cast in that state's presidential primary in January. Florida and Michigan were both penalised by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for holding early primaries, and had their votes disqualified. But as the end game approaches for the Democratic nomination, with neither Senator Hillary Clinton of New York nor Barack Obama of Illinois having reached the requisite 2,026 delegates to clinch the nomination, the party leadership is rethinking its position. On Saturday, a 30-member DNC committee will convene in Washington to figure out whether and how to allocate the almost 1.75 million votes cast in Florida's presidential primary and the 600,000 cast in Michigan. The party leadership apparently realises that Democrats in the two states will be extremely disgruntled if their votes are ignored -- nobody likes to be told that their vote is worthless -- and many could stay home on Election Day in November. The DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee will hear from the campaign staff for Obama and Clinton, as well as three members of the FDP and a spokesman for the DNC. ”Then we will break for lunch and in the afternoon, the Rules and Bylaws Committee will work on resolving the issue,” explained DNC spokeswoman Stacie Paxton. Clinton won 50 percent of the vote in Florida, which has 210 delegates. In Michigan, where Obama took his name off the ballot, she took 55 percent to 40 percent for ”uncommitted”. Michigan has 156 delegates. Clinton is urging the party to seat all of the Florida and Michigan delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado this August. This would help boost her delegate tally -- although not dramatically -- to close on Obama, who has a lead in delegates and is now the clear favourite to become the Democratic Party's presidential candidate. However, in a memo sent to the committee this week, DNC lawyers said that at most, the party could reinstate half the delegates, or give half a vote each to all of them. Josh Earnest, a spokesperson for the Obama campaign, said the candidate would propose that the delegates be evenly split. ”What Senator Obama has been saying for several months is that the Florida votes should count and that he would like to use his influence to make sure that the Florida delegates are seated at the convention,” he told IPS. Earnest went on to say that, ”Senator Obama has even made some concessions so that the issue could be resolved.” When asked to elaborate on those concessions, he quickly said, ”This is still being talked about and we don't want to resolve it in the media.” Senator Clinton's staff did not return IPS telephone inquiries for this story. Florida has the most unique voting demographics of all of the U.S. Southern states. Although it has a Republican governor, one Republican U.S senator, and a vast majority of Republicans in both houses of the state legislature, there are more registered Democratic voters than Republicans. It is not the first time the state has been in the eye of an electoral storm. The most notorious, of course, was the 2000 debacle that brought George W. Bush to office with a mere handful of votes, after the U.S. Supreme Court halted a recount in some Florida precincts. But Professor Gary Mormino, a history professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, related another less famous but perhaps equally colourful story. ”It was in Florida in 1876 that the state had a key role to play in the presidential election that year between (Republican candidate Rutherford) Hayes and (Democratic candidate Samuel) Tilden. There were disputed elections here in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. At one point, one Florida city sent its votes by way of boat to the city where the state's officials in charge were to count the votes. But the votes never got there; nobody knows what happened to them,” Mormino said. An electoral commission was created by the U.S. Congress to decide the winner of the 1876 election and named Hayes president. But it is the Democratic Party's own internal rules that will determine the fate of Florida's primary votes this time around. Michael Martinez, an associate professor of political science at the University of Florida, said, ”I recall at the outset of this dispute between the DNC and the Florida Democratic Party that the conventional wisdom was that the nominee would seat all of the delegates, and I suspect that will be the case, no matter how this turns out.” For Republicans in Florida, the controversy is manna from heaven. ”Obviously, we would hope that everybody's votes are counted. But we think the Democrats have done enough damage among themselves with this issue that they have lost many voters. We're just waiting, like everybody else, to see how all of this will play out,” said Katie Gordon, press secretary for the Republican Party of Florida. The Republican National Convention is to be held in September in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, where U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona will be installed as the party's official presidential candidate. Meanwhile, a federal judge in Tampa threw out a lawsuit this week by Democratic political consultant Victor DiMaio alleging that the DNC's handling of Florida's primary votes violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because the DNC admitted that it had allowed Nevada and South Carolina to hold their primaries early because the Democrats wanted to register more African-American, Asian, and Hispanic voters. DiMaio says he will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. ***** + POLITICS-US: Florida Can't Resist a Good Electoral Row (http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39402) + More IPS Coverage of the 2008 U.S. Election (http://www.ipsnews.net/new_focus/us_elections2008/index.asp) (END/IPS/NA/IP/EL/MW/KS/08) = 05291729 ORP008 NNNN