The Current Situation

Did you know that:

• Michigan's votes are not being counted in the Democratic primary? 
• The primary candidates were prohibited from campaigning in Michigan?
• Most of the Democratic primary candidates removed their names from the ballot in our primary, making it impossible to vote for them?

Does that sound like a democratic process to you?

What Happened?

It started when the Michigan legislature voted to move Michigan's 2008 primary to January 15th. The Democratic National Committee has its own rules about when primaries should be scheduled, and when Michigan bucked those rules, the DNC retaliated by effectively destroying Michigan's primary.

First, the DNC said they would not seat Michigan's primary delegates at the Democratic convention. That means Michigan's votes will not be counted.

That was followed by a request from the chairs of the Democratic parties in the four approved early-primary states for the candidates to sign a pledge not to campaign in Michigan or Florida, which all of the major candidates signed.  This prevented us from making an informed decision about which candidate to support.

Third, most of the candidates removed their names from Michigan's primary ballot, making it impossible to vote for them (writing in a removed candidate's name was not counted).

At first I assumed (like most people, I think) that both sides were just posturing, and that they would come to a compromise and everything would work out. After all, the national Democrats and Michigan's Democrats are on the same side, and the DNC's retaliation was far too harsh, disenfranchising Michigan's 6.5 million voters. Surely they could sort something out.

Our primary has already happened, and they didn't manage to sort it out beforehand.  We can only hope for a solution before the convention.

Michigan's legislature and the Democratic National Committee played a high-stakes game of "chicken" with our votes at stake, and at the end of the day we, the voters of Michigan, lost.