Liz Benjamin’s Capital Tonight blog reports that the New York State Republican Party changed its rules to abolish the winner-take-all system for the upcoming 2012 Republican Presidential Primary.
Woohoo!
The system that was in place worked as follows. Whichever Republican candidate won a majority of votes statewide was the only candidate entitled to send their delegates to the Republican National Convention. Before that system, each Congressional district was able to vote for whichever candidate’s delegates they preferred and whichever delegates won in those Congressional districts went on to the convention. Apparently, the NYGOP has returned back to this more democratic system, which is a big plus for the Republican grassroots in the state.
It is not clear, however, from the details of the post, what the system will look like now. For instance, in 2000, delegates and alternate delegates had to petition their way onto the ballot on behalf of a Presidential campaign in order for that candidate to appear on the ballot. In the winner-take-all system, any candidate meeting a certain set of criteria, such as eligibility for federal Presidential election matching funds, would automatically be placed on the ballot and each campaign could simply designate who their delegates would be for each Congressional district. Since it was the candidate and not the delegates running in the primary, only the actual candidate’s names would appear on the ballot–not the delegate’s.
I’m sure the details will surface soon enough, but in the mean time, start figuring out who you want to be the Republican presidential nominee in ’12 since now what you think might actually matter for once to the NYGOP!