Friday, April 01, 2016
Trump’s faithless delegates?
?Nate talks about a few things that I was tweeting a few weeks ago, namely:
We might say a candidate “racked up 44 delegates” in the same way we’d say Steph Curry scored 44 points. But those delegates aren’t just a scoring mechanism: Delegates are people, my friends. Delegates are people!...
If they wanted to, the delegates could deploy a “nuclear option” on Trump and vote to unbind themselves on the first ballot, a strategy Ted Kennedy unsuccessfully pursued against Jimmy Carter in 1980...
A final possibility is “faithless delegates,” where individual delegates simply decline to vote for Trump despite being bound to do so by party rules. It’s not clear whether this is allowed under Republican rules, but it’s also not clear what the enforcement mechanism would be.
And that last part is the key. If a person has to actively participate in the voting, he now has a choice of what to do, regardless of the rules. After all, if you are "forced" to vote, that's no vote at all. There's no reason at all to vote. Just count the Curry points like Nate analogizes. If you are forced, the only thing they can do is give you an already punched ballot, then the only choice you have is to vote for that person, or not vote at all.
Without an enforcement mechanism, then all of this voting we've had so far is basically just for show. It's a party that comes state to state like a circus. But ultimately meaningless.