Speaker Nancy Pelosi has added her voice to those who are calling on the superdelegates not to overrule the voters.  She joins MoveOn, Democracy for America and many more in urging the superdelegates not to determine the winner of the Democratic presidential primary by what amounts to a vote in a smokey back room. ChronBlog

Don’t veto the people’s choice.

“I think there is a concern when the public speaks and there is a counter-decision made to that,” she said, adding quickly, “I don’t think that will happen.”

She said the governors, lawmakers, DNC members and others picked as super delegates are chosen through a grassroots process and are accountable to the party’s voters.

“I do think that they have a respect — it’s not just following the returns, it’s also having a respect for what has been said by the people,” Pelosi said. “It would be a problem for the party if the verdict would be something different than the public has decided.”

This is obviously an argument that would appear to most benefit Barack Obama, given that he currently leads in both the pledged delegate count and the popular vote.  Speaker Pelosi’s opinion should wield a great deal of influence on her fellow superdelegates.

Several of those members of the House closest to Pelosi like Rep. George Miller have endorsed Obama.  Miller is on the team of current legislators tasked with swaying superdelegates to endorse Obama.  The Speaker is rumored to be supportive of Obama, but does not want to undermine her own authority by making an endorsement.  I have to assume that there is a two pronged approach from the Obama superdelegate team: if they don’t get the outright endorsement, supporting the “let the people decide” tact is almost as good.

( – promoted by David Dayen)

Full disclosure: I work for the Courage Campaign

BradBlog, as is the norm over there, provides an excellent evaluation of where things currently stand with the DTS ‘double bubble’ ballots.  It’s long, in-depth, and awesome. In part:

For the moment then, some 50,000 voters in Los Angeles County have had their votes for Presidential candidate currently miscounted. An intended vote for Hillary Clinton, for example, has not been registered as a vote for her. She has lost that vote for the moment, and the voter has been disenfranchised. Needlessly.

Moreover, current acting Registrar Dean Logan is claiming that, due to the fact that the same sets of bubbles were used for both Dem and AI candidates, it’s “impossible” to determine with absolute certainty the intent of the voter. But he is wrong. In almost every single case.

The current miscount/error rate for those 50,000 ballots is now at 100%. Thus, any ballot counted at this point will only lower the current miscount/error rate.

Since almost every single one of those ballots can be counted accurately, as per the voter intent, beyond a shadow of a doubt, it’s an absolute absurdity and outrage that Logan is claiming that none of them can be, as he argued in an absurd report [PDF] delivered to the County’s Board of Supervisor’s on Monday.

He closes with an elegant summation:

The excuses must stop. Dean Logan must get to work and start counting. NOW.

Any questions?

But w-w-w-wait it gets worse…

The Sacramento Bee has a love note for democracy this Valentine’s Day.  There are still 1 million ballots uncounted from the California primary a week and a half ago.  The state is aiming at a March 4 deadline

Unless you enjoy watching sausage getting made, you may want to look away:

In Sacramento County, 90,000 ballots remain unprocessed, while 277,000 had been counted as of Wednesday afternoon.

Los Angeles County has 200,000 unprocessed ballots – and that’s not counting the 50,000 presidential votes it discarded because a quarter of the decline-to-state voters improperly marked the county’s ballots.

Statewide, Weir said, most of the uncounted votes – about 600,000 – are absentee ballots turned in on election day. Still to be vetted, he reckons, are 400,000 provisional ballots, which typically are valid about 85 percent of the time.

He estimates 10,000 more uncounted ballots are damaged: shredded in the mail, mutilated in vote-counting machines, or gummed up by sloppy voters who dribbled coffee or ketchup on their absentee ballots. Election workers must pry them open, try to figure out the voter’s intention, and then create a fresh ballot to feed into the machine.

Most likely this doesn’t ultimately have a huge impact overall, and the article notes that Mitt Romney dropped out anyway.  But it begs the question.  As an example, if either the full results were known sooner and Romney had done better or the nomination schedule was a bit slower, would people be dropping out so fast?  The whole vote-and-forget thing seems poised to draw a little attention here.

Regardless, the current state of California’s electoral infrastructure is becoming much more clear in the public eye.  I’ve got no objection to it taking a while to count mountains of absentee votes or even the due diligence involved in checking provisional and DTS ballots.  But it isn’t exactly the simple process people try to make it.

We know you loved Nevadatics so much, that I’ll be heading to Austin to do some coverage of the Texas March 4 Primary. So, Texatics here we come! I’ll be headed down on 2/29 to experience all that is the Texas primary.

A funny thing, this is really. I lived in Texas for about 20 years, and I can’t really remember having a competitive primary there. But, I suppose this is the year.

The polling has generally given Senator Clinton a fairly large lead. However, that seems to be changing, with the race tightening. You can see in the graph from Pollster.com that the orange line (Obama) is gaining on the purple line (Clinton) in the last few weeks. To be sure, Clinton has some advantages in the state, but Obama is rapidly gaining. In fact, from Ralph Bordie at IVR polls (who, incidentally has been tremendously helpful on the 50-state Blog Roundups), we see that Obama has moved the spread from 18 down to 10 in about three weeks from 1/10->1/30.  All bets are off if Obama wins Wisconsin big.  

By the way, the polling in Texas has been very scant. So scant, in fact, that Burnt Orange Report commissioned most of the polls that are in the pollster.com graph.

Texas is an open primary, anybody can vote in any primary. In fact, I’m 99% sure from my days when I was a TX precinct chair (Go Fighting 1806!) that there is no party registration. Another thing to note about Texas is they have a very handy early voting system, where you can basically go to your local library or school anytime within a few weeks of the election and vote. It’s all quite convenient. I’m not sure of the early voting rate in Texas, but I imagine it’s slightly lower than our own Vote by mail.

One last thing, it seems much of the leadership of the Democratic Party in Texas is breaking for Obama. Or so I’m told by Matt Glazer.

I’ll be trying to produce regular dispatches from Austin when I’m there, and for between now and then, I highly recommend BOR.

I am firmly committed to getting a 2/3 majority in both houses of the state Legislature by 2010.  Fabian Nuñez believes that, in the Assembly, we can get halfway there by November.

Speaking at the Sacramento Press Club yesterday, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez said Democrats should add three seats to their 48-32 majority in the California Assembly in November’s elections.

Nunez made the prediction after new figures from the Secretary of State show a surge in Democratic registrations in all but two Assembly districts, including three held by incumbent Republicans who will be forced to leave office.

They include the desert/Riverside area seat held by Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia, the San Diego seat of Assemblywoman Shirley Horton, and the Contra Costa/Sacramento Delta seat held by Assemblyman Guy Houston.

These are clearly the three seats to target.  AD-80 (Garcia’s seat) has some excellent candidates on the Democratic side, including Greg Pettis and the Hispanic Barack Obama, Manuel Perez.  We have good candidates in AD-78 (Horton’s old seat) and AD-15 (Houston’s) as well – as those Caliticians in those districts can attest.  Plus, we not only have registration advantages, but the advantage of a game-changing Democratic nominee at the top of the ticket (whether it’s Obama or Clinton) that will bring new Democratic voters to the process.  These three seats are prime opportunities, and there are other Assembly opportunities like Greg Aghazarian’s seat (he’s also termed out), and more in the Senate (Hannah Beth Jackson’s bid in SD-19, the possible Jeff Denham recall, Abel Maldonado’s SD-15).

However, I want to highlight this nugget about the way Assembly and Senate elections are managed in California.

If Democrats field strong candidates for these seats, we could be looking at a pickup of 2/3+ seats.

Each of the marquee races are expected to be $1 million+ contests. The new Assembly Speaker will be responsible for raising funds and overseeing the campaigns.

on the flip…

I’ve talked about this with party leaders several times, and nobody has given me an adequate explanation about this.  In a way, it’s a lot like the DCCC as the House-based campaign arm for national elections.  But I’m struggling to understand why the Speaker (and the President Pro Tem of the Senate) have the sole responsibility of overseeing these elections and creating advertising, GOTV, etc.  It seems to me that the California Democratic Party would be able to do a much better job in these districts, with their membership already on the ground and involved, and with a larger fundraising base to conduct the operations necessary.  Yet for some reason, there is this bifurcation: the CDP deals with statewide races and Congressional seats, and the Assembly and Senate leadership do the legislative races.  Is this just tradition?  Why can’t the CDP play in whatever race they wish?

This problem, or at least what I consider a problem, is compounded by the fact that we will have new leadership in the Assembly and Senate, leadership that may be unused to running multiple campaign operations out of their offices.  I think Darrell Steinberg is a fine man (so does George Skelton) who’s going to do a great job as the Senate leader, but I don’t know how he’s going to do facilitating Hannah Beth Jackson’s race in the Thousand Oaks area.  Furthermore, the new Assembly Speaker won’t be picked for a month, and we have to start on these races right now.  Obviously the Presidential race is going to take up all the oxygen in the fall, so ensuring that the Democratic candidates get their message out and the Republicans in these open seats are defined is crucial.  And right now, for the next month, there’s literally nobody to do that.

(Also, the proliferation of independent expenditure money in this state necessitates some organizational and financial help for legislative candidates that may otherwise just get swamped.)

I can hold judgment on the efficacy of this and bow to those wiser in the ways of California elections if I were given a satisfactory explanation for this structure.  But nobody has done so, and I’ve spoken to a lot of people inside the CDP about this.  I think 2008, in a favorable environment for Democrats, with no statewide races on the ballot at all, and with a badly broken Republican Party in California that is broke and rife with internal squabbling, would be an excellent time to shift this tradition, and for the CDP to exercise some muscle in these legislative districts, helping solid Democrats get elected and moving us ever closer to the desired 2/3 majority that we need to make the real changes necessary to move the state forward.

This is not an accusation, but a dialogue.  I’m looking for ways for my party to be more effective.