These people’s votes count, not ours.  

Superdelegates have been an integral part of presidential primaries on both sides of the aisle since their inception during the 1984 election. These party officials aren’t elected but rather chosen by the party itself. Superdelegates comprised 15% of the total number of democratic primary votes in 2016. If they had followed the rules of their normal delegate counterparts, it could have heavily swayed the outcome of the presidential primaries.

Superdelegates were created by the democratic and republican parties as a way to check the common people. If a party saw that an unfavorable candidate whom didn’t represent the ideals of the party was on his or her way to getting the required delegate count to win the nomination, the party could step in and push another candidate forward with superdelegates. Both the democratic and the republican parties have them, but democratic superdelegates outnumber republican superdelegates 716 to 150. Furthermore, republican superdelegates must vote in based on primary results in their state, making them unpledged only in name.

The primary elections, as explained by The Washington Post, are a confusing process. In order to officially win a party’s nomination, a certain delegate count must be met by a given candidate. In each state, voters vote for their favorite candidates. When a state’s voting concludes, delegates are assigned to candidates proportionally to their election results. These are called pledged delegates, and they must vote based on the voters in their state at their respective party conventions. Conventions are a largely ceremonial gathering, at which delegates officially vote for their candidates, and candidates accept their nominations.

Unpledged delegates, commonly called superdelegates, are completely unrestricted in their voting at the convention. They are not assigned to candidates during the primaries, but they do unofficially vote in their states in order to give accurate election projections to news sources. According to political professor Robert Shrum, “[Superdelegates] are fundamentally undemocratic.”

In an article on Counterpunch.com, it was revealed that through the Hillary Victory Fund, a fundraising foundation run both by Clinton and the democratic party itself, contributors funnelled almost $4.5 million into states who pledged their superdelegates to Clinton at the democratic convention. In essence, states ‘sold’ themselves for an average of about $130,000.

Hillary Clinton officially accepted her nomination for presidential candidacy on Thursday, July 28th, after claiming a total of 2,811 delegates. According to data gathered by The New York Times, she decisively overcame Bernie Sanders by a vote of 2,811 to 1,879. She hit the required delegate count of 2,383 on June 6, 2016. As of that day, she had claimed 571 superdelegates, a full 24% of her delegate count. In other words, 571 people had more influence on the entire election than most of the people in the United States combined.

Donald Trump, the landslide victor of the republican primary, tweeted on July 24th that ,”An analysis showed that Bernie Sanders would have won the Democratic nomination if it were not for the super delegates.” Politifact.com recalculating delegate counts if superdelegates were normal delegates, and found that Clinton would still have won the nomination 2,590 to 2,150.
This election has shown us the possibility of candidate who does not win their election by appealing to voters, but by having the deepest pockets. This is directly contradictory to the belief that politicians should be elected to serve the people that elected them, not just their campaign contributors. In the words of Mark Twain, “If voting made a difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.”