Alfonse D'Amato

Superdelegate process is a sham and a shame

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Republicans and Democrats in New York state will hold their presidential primaries on April 19. It has been some time since candidates on either side orchestrated fierce campaigns in New York.

On the Democratic side, in order to secure the party’s nomination, either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders must obtain 2,383 total delegates before the Democratic National Convention. As things stand now, Clinton has 1,717 delegates to Sanders’s 1,004, but those numbers don’t quite add up. Sanders has won 15 states, many by wide margins. In fact, if you add up the number of delegates he should have right now with those victories, he is only trailing Clinton 1,243 to 975.

So how is Clinton managing to pull away in the race? Superdelegates. Superdelegates in the Democratic Party are leaders and elected officials who are automatically slated to be delegates at the convention. There are 712 superdelegates nationwide, about 15 percent of the total number of delegates.

Former President Bill Clinton, for example, is a superdelegate. Who do you think he’s supporting? He will join 469 other superdelegates in supporting his wife. So far, Sanders has only 29 pledged superdelegates. If you reversed those numbers, Sanders would be easily winning the race, with 1,444 total delegates to Clinton’s 1,272.

Hillary will have home state advantage in New York due to her eight-year term as one of our senators, similar to Bernie’s advantage in Vermont. But if Bernie were leading the delegate count, he would likely be coming into the New York primary as the favorite, and could have the advantage necessary to win New York’s whopping 291 delegates.

There are 44 superdelegates among those 291, and the list includes Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer and most of the state’s House members. With the primary quickly approaching, superdelegates from New York are announcing that no matter what the vote is across the state, they will be supporting Clinton. The New York Daily News wrote a story about the superdelegate counts, and noted that every single superdelegate they reached about the process said they would never back Sanders.

Doesn’t this make it feel like the race is rigged?

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