Democrats are facing the possibility of a disastrous brokered convention, one that could remind us of the 103 ballot convention in 1924 that made it impossible for the party to win a winnable election.
It seems possible that Bernie Sanders will come to the convention with a plurality of delegates—that is more than any other candidate—but not the majority required to win the nomination on the first ballot. That would lead to a second ballot in which the unelected party leaders and members of Congress who serve as superdelegate would vote.
There are two problems with this scenario.
First, it is very difficult to have a brokered convention without brokers, political leaders who can move large blocks of delegates. The presidential candidates will presumably have some influence on their delegates but not real authority over them. Even with brokers, conventions sometimes led to a long, drawn-out process that, at its worst, embarrassed the party—without the process played out on national TV. Without brokers, a damaging could be very difficult to avoid.
Second, a nominee chosen in large part by unelected superdelegates and over the candidate with most elected delegates would be seen by many as illegitimate. That would especially be true this year if the broad coalition of activists mobilized by Bernie Sanders saw their candidate blocked by superdelegates.
In response to this possibility, Sanders and his supporters have said that the convention should, whether through a change of rules or by moral suasion, nominate the candidate with the most delegates on the first ballot before the superdelegates get involved.
I find this position only half convincing. In a world in which democracy is such a central ideal, the idea of unelected delegates overturning the voice of the voters is deeply problematic. And saying that the “rules are the rules” won’t assuage the sentiments of Sanders supporters, whose votes Democrats desperately will need in November.
Yet while the role of super-delegates is questionable, there is a very good reason for presidential nominees to be selected by a majority of delegates. A presidential candidate must appeal to a broad swath of their party in order to win a general election.
There is a way to ensure that the ultimate nominee is selected by the majority while avoiding a long process of bargaining in front of the TV cameras—instituting a system of ranked-choice voting while excluding superdelegates from the process.
A system of instant ranked-choice voting could be created by asking each delegate to rank order all the candidates nominated in Milwaukee. The votes would be tallied and, if no candidate received a majority, the votes of the candidate with the lowest number of votes would be redistributed to the other candidates. And then this process would continued until one candidate reaches a majority.
A second, and to my mind, preferable system would be to have a series of ballots with the candidate with fewest votes being excluded after each ballot until one candidate secures a majority. This would allow time for some deliberation and coalition formation among candidates between ballots which would help ensure that candidate ultimately secures the agreement of a broad majority of the party.
In either case, the superdelegates would not be allowed to influence the ultimate nominee.
To make this work, the candidates would have to agree very soon, before the process has gone much further, to recommend that their delegates change the rules at the opening of the convention. And they would have to pledge not to make further demands to change the rules later.
Instituting a process along these lines would have a number of advantages over a brokered convention. It would.
- guarantee a result would be arrived within a few ballots;
- be a clearly democratic process and the ultimate winner could not be said to be the product of unelected delegates.
- strongly encourage the candidates today to work with one another to build a majority and perhaps discourage them from trashing each other in debates;
- and make would make for exciting—but not too exciting—TV, increasing attention for the Democratic convention.
I don’t know which candidate would benefit from this process for choosing the Democratic nominee. Depending on the outcome of the primaries, I could see it helping any of three or four candidates. And that is one more advantage of changing the rules in this way: It keeps majority rule and makes the process more democratic, while not changing the rules to obviously benefit one candidate or another.