Hillary Clinton's most recent swipe at pledged delegates -- her appeal to North Dakota caucus delegates to switch sides and vote for her -- has raised my blood pressure more than a can of V8 could.
You see, I understand that pledged delegates are not, according to DNC rules, legally or procedurally bound to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged. And I also understand that because of the way slates of delegates are filed, it's highly unlikely that pledged delegates from primary states are actually going to change their votes (unless, of course, they are pledged to a candidate who's dropped out of the race or suspended his campaign).
But what has me going is the way she's targeting caucus states. And that's because caucus states are different. I know. I live in one.
Here in Washington, a caucus takes place first at the precinct level. Each legislative district (LD) is divided into precincts, which are very small subsections of the LD. The people in your precinct are very literally your neighbors. I recognized most of the 34 people from my precinct at my caucus, either because they live in the same apartment complex I do, or because I pass them on the street when I'm biking to work in the morning, or because we are frequently riding the same bus.
At the precinct level, each person in attendance states his or her candidate preference on the sign-in sheet. Then the votes on the sign-in sheet are tallied, and based on the way the numbers break down, we do the math to determine how many of the delegates assigned to our precinct will be delegates for each candidate who got votes. There's a negotiation period, during which lone supporters of candidates other than the ones who have enough votes to get delegates can decide to either keep their preference or switch to a candidate who has delegates.
After all of that is done, people from each of the lists of candidate supporters are elected as delegates to go on to the LD-level caucus.
Let me be emphatic:
Precinct-level delegates are elected by their neighbors to represent a vote for the candidate who earned that delegate position.
Now, Hillary Clinton has been making a big to-do about the fact that she wants to make sure Florida and Michigan's delegates are seated at the convention so that the voters in that state aren't disenfranchised.
She has also been making a big to-do about not dropping out of the race because she wants the remaining 10 states to have a chance to vote, so that none of their voters are disenfranchised either.
But apparently, Hillary Clinton thinks that if a caucus delegate changes his or her vote, despite having been elected by friends and neighbors to carry forward their vote in the caucus process, that's just "the breaks."
I have to tell you, though, it very clearly spells "disenfranchisement" to me.