State Democrats Vote to Rewrite Primary Rules

SAN FRANCISCO — California Democratic Party officials voted Sunday to rewrite the rules for the state’s June 7 presidential primary to eliminate the long lists of individual candidates for delegation seats that faced Democratic voters in 1984.

Instead, California Democrats would vote directly for presidential candidates, as they did in 1980 and earlier primaries, under the plan adopted by a nearly unanimous vote of more than 150 members of the party’s state Executive Committee.

‘Winner-Take-Most’ Rules

The new delegate selection plan would also abolish the so-called “winner-take-most” rules of California’s 1984 Democratic primary, which gave the top candidate a disproportionately greater share of delegates than his popular vote, at the expense of candidates finishing further down the list.

Instead of winner-take-all in each congressional district, 205 delegates would be allocated by popular direct vote for President within their districts, and 131 add-on and at-large delegates would be allocated in proportion to the statewide popular vote.

The new primary rules would also provide for caucuses on Sunday, May 1, by supporters of each presidential candidates in each of California’s 45 congressional districts to decide which delegates would be sent to the national convention if their candidate won seats from their district.

Although that is as complicated as the 1984 rules for potential delegates and election officials to sort out, it would greatly simplify the ballot for the average voter, who would be choosing only among recognized presidential candidates, not the long lists of as many as 60 names of delegate candidates that appeared on 1984 ballots.

The proposed new rules affect how 336 pledged delegates will be selected in California’s June primary. The total state delegation, including national party officials and congressional members from California, will be about 375 delegates.

The emergency Executive Committee meeting at a hotel at the San Francisco airport was an 11th-hour attempt to break an impasse between leaders of the official state party and Democrats in the state Senate over relatively obscure details in the election plan, and a spokeswoman for the Senate predicted ratification of the plan by the Legislature.

Affects Only Democrats

If that impasse is not broken, California Democrats would be forced to conduct their June primary under the 1984 rules, which none of the major factions in the dispute favors because of the confusion the 1984 rules caused voters.

The issue affects only how California Democrats will pick their delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta this July, since Republicans have decided to retain their winner-take-all rules for picking California’s 165 delegates to the Republican National Convention in New Orleans.