Reply #162: I find "the will" of caucus voters highly suspect

[Tom Rinaldo]

Don't get me wrong, they are part of the system both sides played in so their results are "valid", but flawed from a democratic perspecive. And the official independence of Super Delegates is just as much a part of the rules and therefor just as valid.

We have caucuses like in Washington State that went overwhelmingly to Obama while a Democratic primary vote held just a few weeks later with multiple times the voters participating gave Obama a much more narrow win. We have caucuses like in Nevada where Clinton had a solid lead over Obama in the popular vote but was awarded less delegates than Obama. We have a caucus in a State like Texas where a small subset of the Democrats who all cast votes in the primary got to "vote" a second time if they could fit the caucus hours into their schedule, with the result that a minority of people double voting swung the results from the much larger primary vote pool back toward Obama after Clinton won the primary. We have caucus results from a state like Iowa where candidates who did not initially meet the viability threshold cooperatted in trading caucus supporters in an effort to slow down the front runner in the race, who then was Hillary Clinton. Caucuses game the system. They are "fair" if you consider gaming the system fair. They count but so do the Super Delegates.

1,734,456 Democrats voted in this year's Florida Democratic Primary on January 29th. So far this election season the Democratic Party has held delegate awarding caucuses in 12 States. 1,176,579 Democrats participated in all of those Democratic caucuses combined. Which means that a total of 557,877 MORE Democrats took part in the Florida Primary alone, than took part in all of the Democratic caucuses held in 2008.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4636542

I think your concept of "the will of the people" is simplistic and misleading.