I didn't watch all of the RBC meeting today, but I did watch a large portion including the comments by Rep. Wexler, Sen. Levin, and Mark Brewer, as well as all of the debates following the extended lunch break.
Firstly, I feel that the elections in both FL and MI are unlikely to be accurate representations of voter sentiment in those two states. This is obvious in MI, but perhaps not-so-much in FL. I would expect the FL results are much more accurate, but there has been some discussion that the electorate was shifted older than it would have been in a full election due to a Property Tax vote on the ballot which would tend to not draw as much from the much younger voters.
The results in MI I must say are almost completely uninterpretable...
As discussed on Poblano's highly-recommended site FiveThirtyEight.com, voter turnout was much lower than other similar primaries:
...(T)he turnout situation in Michigan wasn't remotely normal. According to Jay Cost's spreadsheet, turnout in Michigan was equal to 24 percent of John Kerry's vote in 2004. However, the average in other states with open primaries was 79 percent. In other words, turnout was only about one-third as much as it should have been. The judgment of two-thirds of the voters in Michigan was essentially that the primary didn't matter and wasn't worth their time.
Even beyond that, there's no telling (especially from untrustworthy exit poll data) what the true intention of voters in that state were. We can look at the exit poll data and argue that Sen. Clinton should have gotten 4% less support and some other stuff including assumptions about write-in ballots which can't be read (granted, it would be expected that most would go for Obama) to give a 45%-36% Clinton outcome, but this seems like a horrible, and perhaps dangerous, idea.
If it weren't for (apparently legitimate) fears about disenfranchisement of voters in these two states, I'd argue to keep with the 100% penalty. It establishes a strict precedent and a strong deterrent against states like MI and FL which might do this later on. And since what-if scenarios of the outcome of the votes in these two states had there been delegates on the line are impossible to determine with absolute certainty, it would ensure that these votes count exactly as they were expected by those who did and, just as important, didn't vote in those elections.
Since this wasn't the case, I think Kagro X is spot on with his analysis of the 'final' decision in MI. Had I been on that committee (which I am not remotely qualified to be) I think I would have preferred the simplest and perhaps most rule-abiding decision, a simple 50% cut in the voting power of every delegate in both states. This was the final outcome of FL but not with MI as the re-allocated delegates which doesn't seem like something the RBC should have power to do (or anything other than a DNC-sanctioned contest).
Yes, this would have hurt Sen. Obama more than the final decision. However, this wasn't really about candidates, it was about the rules, the voters, and the general election independent of nominee. What I liked least about today's RBC meeting was that for most it wasn't the focus. I find it unlikely that the 12 individuals who voted in favor of full seating of Florida would have voted that way had it not benefited their candidate-choice most. This should have been independent of candidate and these committee members should have approached this issue from the side of the rules, and not their candidates.
I hope in the future the RBC thinks twice before removing all of the delegates from a state if there is the slightest chance they might have to be reinstated. Harsh penalties are called for for breaking the rules, but a 100% reduction is something that cannot be undone after the vote has occurred. In the future, if they want harsher than 50% I advise they look to 75% or 66% reduction as I would expect elections under such situations would still result in voters turning out in similar numbers to before.
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Disclaimer: I am an Obama supporter, but I did my best to keep that out of the reasoning of my above argument. We shouldn't care about who these decisions help or hurt, but which are truest to the rules.