On the Florida front, today Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL), who is also a Hillary Clinton supporter, wrote Howard Dean a letter in which he advocated a do-over primary (h/t Ben Smith):
There are two options for seating the Florida delegation. Either the DNC should seat the delegation according to the election results from the Jan. 29 Florida primary or allow a do-over election in early June, paid for by the DNC.I believe a primary would be the only fair way to resolve the issue in Florida, which has no tradition of a caucus. It would be manifestly unfair to replace a primary with a caucus, in which only a fraction of the 1.7 million Floridians who voted in the January 29 Democratic primary would participate.
Howard Dean made clear on CNN this morning that the DNC would not pay for a do-over contest -- that the DNC's resources now have to be trained on attacking John McCain -- so it's still unclear who would be footing this bill if a primary were to be scheduled. Ben Smith offers an alternate possibility, however:
Still, if this is down to haggling over money -- the cost of a vote-by-mail primary is expected to be about $5 million -- that suggests it's going to happen.
As for Michigan, Gov. Jennifer Granholm has previously discounted the possibility of the state's holding another primary, again, due to the cost, but would be fine with a caucus, which, according to The New Republic is exactly what Michigan intends to do.
A member of the DNC's Rules And Bylaws Committee--the committee that stripped Florida and Michigan of its delegates for moving their primaries before February 5th--told me that Michigan plans to get out of its uncounted delegate problem by announcing a new caucus in the next few days."They want to play. They know how to do caucuses," the DNC source said. "That was their plan all along, before they got cute with the primary."
Michigan Democrats had originally planned on caucuses after the legally permissible Feb. 5 date, but then went along with top elected Democrats, including Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who pushed for an early primary.
If these two scenarios do come to pass, it seems to me that it would represent the fairest of all results. Not only would the voters of two key states be represented at the convention in Denver and in a way that has no taint, but it would also split the methods by which the contests are run, evening the score, if you will since on its face, a big state primary would be more likely to favor Clinton while a caucus generally favors Obama. And hey, anything to stretch this thing out even longer...
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