When Delawareans vote in their Rep. District (RD) Presidential Primary, some of those votes are actually counted in other Rep. Districts!

The News Journal reported that Representative District 29 was the only RD in Delaware where Bernie Sanders won — I looked up the voting data and Delaware Online reported the wrong numbers — Hillary Clinton won that district. I started looking at the voting data to see if the Election District I live in supported Sanders or Clinton – they supported Sanders. I looked throughout the data to see if any RD supported Sanders over Clinton and I saw that the 13th District supported Sanders over Clinton by only 3 votes — I thought that was odd.

 

Clinton won 1,299 to Sanders 710 29th District.

If you look at the below photo of the votes from the 13th District, it shows that Sanders won that RD by 3.  While I continued to look at the data, I noticed that Election District 09 in the 19th District was missing.  I emailed the Department of Elections to ask why, here is what I was told:

Election Districts are combined in Presidential Primary if they are in the same building since it is all one ballot. Marbrook has both 02-13 and 02-19.  They both reported as 02-13 since that was the lower number.

The 13th District received votes from the 19th District RD from ED 09-19 (Marbrook). The 13th District RD 02-13 and 19th District RD 09-19  (see page 4) share Marbrook Elementary School during elections – they also share votes during the Presidential Primary election. All votes from 09-19 (Marbrook location) were entered into 02-13 – 13th District – I believe that is why Sanders won the 13th District by 3 votes.

Rep. District 13 – 02-13 includes votes from Rep. District 19 – 09-19.

Look at the 19th District vote total below,  you can see that the 19th Election District 09-19 was not reported on the State of Delaware Unofficial Election results.

09-19 voting data is not listed in the above photo.

There are 12 Election Districts in the 19th District and 10 polling locations – two of the 19th District polling locations have 2 ED’s on election day. When the state reports out, they do not show all the ED’s. An example:  If you look at the above photo, 01-19 includes 12-19 voters who vote at DelCastle High School and 07-19 includes 08-19 voters who vote at Stanton Middle School. The above report should reflect where 08-19 and 12-19 voting data is being reported to make it more transparent.

The Representative Districts (RD) should have only their constituents’ votes in a presidential primary election not neighboring districts.

 

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Super Delegates Must Go

The super delegate needs to be removed from the Democratic party presidential primary process. Our party’s platform has a long history of fighting for voting rights. The current presidential primary system makes it more difficult for an individuals’ votes to count. It seems the party only wants the voters’ voices to be heard during a presidential election when the candidate has already been chosen for us through the use of super delegates – which flies in the face of everything our political process stands for. We have a system that allows certain people in our party to cast a vote for a presidential primary candidate who the people did not support. They commit to a presidential primary candidate before the election has even taken place. You talk about suppressing the voters’ voices!

Yesterday on Morning Joe, they spoke about this issue with our party. They commented on how they thought the Democratic primary system is rigged against voters. It is a system in favor of the rich, powerful and politically connected.  Watch Morning Joe’s video. Bernie Sanders wins Wyoming by 12% points but he loses Wyoming to Hillary Clinton, how is this system not rigged? The people voted for Sanders — yet Clinton walks away with more delegates. Does the party only want our votes to count in a General Election for the candidate that they choose for us?

Click here, to see every Democratic super delegate in the nation.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida congresswoman and Democratic Party chair, made it clear as to why the party has super delegates.

“Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists.” 

If we want all voters’ voices to count, then we need to change our election system.