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June 12th, 2016 
Awake Goy
Susanne Posel ,Chief Editor Occupy Corporatism | Media Spokesperson, HEALTH MAX Group
Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has been asking people to sign a petition to end the use of the Democratic Party’s superdelegates for the good of politics.
The petition reads in part: “The current system is designed to stand against grassroots activists and the will of the voters.”
Gabbard wrote on her Facebook page : “Whether you are a Bernie Sanders supporter or a Hillary Clinton supporter, we should all agree that unelected party officials and lobbyists should not have a say in who the presidential nominee of our party is. That should be left up to the voters.”
The problem with the superdelegates has been plaguing this election season which is why earlier this year, delegates at the Maine Democratic Party (MDP) statewide convention rocked the political world when Congresswoman Diane Russell proposed an amendment regarding superdelegates.
Russell suggested that democratic superdelegates be allocated proportionally according to the popular vote and this idea passed the MDP with quite a bit of happy cheering because such a thing would “reduce the clout of unpledged elected officials and party insiders”.
The congresswoman said : “We have a system of government where you have one person, one vote, by and large. The primary system is not when that happens. And I think that we need to start moving toward a system that’s more fair, that’s more democratic and more reflective of the popular vote.”
Although this proposal is “nonbinding” for this election season, the 2020 elections are up for grabs.
Superdelegates have become the headlining act in the Democratic National Convention’s bag of tricks because of the mere fact that they exist.
These are party “insiders” who “prefer to fly under the radar” because they are made up mostly of influential legislators, governors and former elected officials.
For their vote, superdelegates can enjoy kickbacks like “a hotel room at the convention”. And according to Senator Claire McCaskill: “The majority of superdelegates I’ve talked to are committed, but it is a matter of timing. They’re just preferring to make their decision public after the primaries are over. … They would like someone else to act for them before they talk about it in the cold light of day.”
Take the race in 2008. Superdelegates had a lot of sway in the vote between Obama and Clinton during the primary, particularly because Hillary figured out that she wasn’t going to win if she did not begin publicly courting them.
But the coaxing of superdelegates to win a primary was not the intention of the DNC, so their Rules and Bylaws Committee got together in 2010 to ponder the notion of doing away with them.
In the end, “the rules committee took a dim view of this proposal. While endorsing recommendations to dilute the superdelegates’ influence (mostly by increasing the number of ordinary delegates), it quietly nixed the redefinition of their voting powers at it July 10 meeting. How quietly? Enough that even some members of the change commission hadn’t yet heard about it when NEWSWEEK spoke to them last week.”
Now that the superdelegates powers were only slightly reduced, problem solved. And yet problems still persisted. James Roosevelt, grandson of the former president and DNC rules committee co-chair explained : “People ask: isn’t it enough for folks to have floor privileges and a hotel room and not have an actual vote? The answer is: what you’re doing is creating two classes of delegates, people with the vote and people without the vote. Clearly, the people at the grassroots level should be the predominant voice. But if you don’t give elected officials a real voice, they are basically second-class citizens.”
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