Moral vs. Procedural

Chris Bowers does a fine job with the popular vote question:

The problem with this popular vote total is that it is a moral argument about the will of the participants in the Democratic nomination campaign, not a legal argument over the definition of the winner of the nomination campaign. Legally, the Democratic nominee is determined by delegates, not by popular vote totals. For a moral argument about the popular vote–a.k.a. the will of the nomination campaign electorate–to carry weight, it needs to be as inclusive as possible in its vote totals. Instead, this vote total pretends that the over 550,000 caucus goers in Washington, Nevada, Maine and Iowa, not to mention the quarter of a million uncommitted voters in Michigan, didn’t actually have candidate preferences in the nomination campaign just because those candidate preferences weren’t recorded. Excluding those 800,000 participants in the nomination campaign from a popular vote toal, especially when exit polls and turnout numbers make close estimates on those preferences quite simple, renders that popular total pointless. Since popular vote totals are statements of moral value, mass exclusions of this sort drains any popular total of all its moral force.

The popular vote total in the nomination campaign is a moral argument about fairness, intra-party democracy, and legitimacy. It isn’t even a moral argument that many people accept, given, among other issues, the variances in voter eligibility from state to state, the various “legitimacy” of the nomination events used in the totals, and the staggered primary calendar itself.

Which is pretty much a more eloquent version of what I wrote here.