Superdelegates: Not So Super?

You have probably heard a lot of talk, or even banter being bandied about regarding the so-called “superdelegates” who may have the power to swing the Democratic nomination for president. If you are like some, you may well be wondering. Examples of the kinds of questions you may encounter within your wondering self are:

• What exactly are super-delegates?

• Where do they come from?

• What do they want from us?

To understand the phenomenon of Super Delegates, we must first return to the mainstay of American democracy, the Electoral College. The founding fathers included the Electoral College as the third, or “bicameral” branch of government as a check and/or balance against the power of the other branches, the Judiciary and the Bureaucracy.

The word “Electoral” itself comes from the Latin root Electra, the mythological female assassin who stalks the streets preying on evil-doers. Just as you can take any course you want as an “elective” in regular college, the “electors” in the Electoral college can vote for anybody they want. This insulates the government from the so-called “tyranny of the majority” where the candidate with the most votes wins the election. (See Hayes v. Tilden, Bush v. Gore, etc.)

Luckily, nowadays we have many sedimentary layers and substrata between voters and elected officials to limit access and prevent undue voter influence on government. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that donating huge sums of money to forward a political agenda is a form of free speech, which is of course a self-evident truth since all men are created equal. Of course, all men do not have equal bank account balances and stock portfolios, because that would be Communism. And there are no super-delegates in Communism.

So, in summation, only Communists are against superdelegates, and God Bless the Enlightened Voters of these United States of America. Except for those voters in Florida and Michigan which don’t count this year.*


*Superdelegates from Florida and Michigan still count.