Delegate Selection Plan Adds to Winners' Spoils

In the end, delegates are the name of the game in any candidate's quest for a party nomination. No matter how many ballots it takes, nobody will be able to walk out of the convention hall in San Francisco the Democratic candidate for president unless he can muster support from a majority of the delegates.

In Massachusetts, those precious delegates are chosen through dual system with "threshold levels" designed to prevent less popular candidates from winning delegates and accentuate the leads of the top vote-getters.

Bay State voters will actually only select a little over half of the common-wealth's 116 convention delegates and 39 alternates when they vote today. Except for 14 slots, the remainder will not be chosen until the Democratic State Convention in early June. The 68 delegates elected today will represent voter preferences in Massachusetts congressional districts. Each of the eleven congressional districts will send an equal number of representatives to San Francisco except for the fifth district and Cambridge's eighth district which, based on the democratic turnout in the last presidential and gubernatorial election, will receive an extra delegate.

District Delegates

Each candidate will receive a number of delegates equivalent to his share of the vote in each particular congressional district. But any candiate who does not surpass "the presidential preference threshold," 14.4 percent of the vote in the fifth and the eighth districts and 16.6 percent of the vote in the rest of the state, will not get any delegates. So if for example, a candidate were to finish with 10 percent of the state-wide vote but not garner more than 14 percent in any one congressional district, rather than receive seven of the 68 directly-elected delegates, the candidate would not earn any Massachusetts delegates because of his failure to reach the threshold.

Statewide Slots

Though the other 48 delegates are not elected directly by the Massachusetts voters, most of the delegates chosen for these slots will reflect the results of today's primary. These other members of the Massachusetts delegation are split into two catagories: 23 at-large delegates elected at the Democrat State Convention and 25 elected and party officials, most of whom are also chosen at the state convention. The new catagory of party and elected officials is part of a nationwide change instituted by the Democratic National Committee to ensure that there are more experienced people on the floor of the convention.

Fourteen of the elected and party officials slots will automatically go to members of the Massachusetts Democratic Congressional delegation, but two of the rest of the elected and party officials delegation as well as the at-large representatives will be selected on the basis of statewide primary results.

But here again there is a threshold candidates must reach before they can receive any seats. In this case, if a candidate does not receive a full 20 percent of the votes cast, he will not be eligible to receive any pledged delegates from the 34 remaining statewide seats. Instead these seats are divided up among the candidates who garner totals of over 20 percent of the statewide vote in proportion to their primary support.