Schrag: How We Choose a President

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

It's Super Tuesday, the pinnacle of what's now surely the most cockamamie election nonsystem ever devised by the mind of man (and woman, too, if you insist). Voters in California and 21 other states will ballot in primaries or caucuses to choose delegates allocated by varying formulas according to the whims of the respective parties.

In California, you get so many delegates for carrying each congressional district; so many for carrying the whole state, plus some others. For Republicans, it pays to focus on districts with few GOP voters, since winning there gets you the same number of delegates.

Of course, if you hadn't registered by the Jan. 22 deadline, well before last week's round of debates, you're out of luck. In some states, if you don't have a photo ID, or a raft of other documentation, you're disenfranchised.

In nine states on the other hand, among them Maine, Minnesota and Wisconsin, you can register at the polls on Election Day. Voting in those states runs about 12 percentage points higher on average than it does in states that don't have Election Day registration.

There have been a few instances of ineligible voters casting ballots, but most were the result of error, not fraud.

If you were a Democrat in Florida last week your vote didn't count at all – unless of course the party changes its mind this summer and suspends its attempt to punish the state for trying to jump to the front of the primary line. In California, if you're an independent, you can't vote in the Republican primary, but you can vote in the Democratic primary.

Bill Bagley, for many years a respected liberal Republican legislator (yes, Virginia, there used to be such people) and later a regent of the University of California, is so angry at his old party that he re-registered as an independent and voted for Barack Obama. That big tent, he asked, whatever happened to it? Obama may get quite a few votes like his.

There have always been two different theories about voting – one that seeks to be inclusive even at the risk of some ineligible people getting a ballot, the other willing to exclude qualified voters to prevent fraud – or to increase the chances that only the informed, the educated and the propertied vote.