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MyDrunkAccount ago

Tried goggling it but nothing came up, what is a "Roll Call" and what's the significance of winning it?

SenecaTheYounger ago

The Roll Call vote at the conventions is where the States are each called in Alphabetical order and announce the number of delegates pledged for each candidate that has been nominated.

Here's a video of the DNC's Roll Call vote. Skip to about an hour in and you will see the action pretty quickly. Basically the secretary calls the states name, gives the number of delegates total, then the mic is turned over to the states rep. The state rep then announces the delegate count for each.

Secretary: Arkansas, you have 37 votes, how do you cast your votes?

Arkansas Delegate: [Some lame shit about the state] 10 votes for Bernie Sanders and Arkansas enthusiastically casts 27 votes for the next POTUS Hillary Clinton!

EDIT: The significance of this is the fact that they are actually selecting their nomninee in this process. At the RNC it's different as each delegate is beholden to vote for who they were elected to vote for (with...some exceptions..), but at the DNC the superdelegates are allowed to change their vote at any time leading up to their Roll Call announcement, meaning a "Sanders" superdelegate could decide at the beginning of the Roll Call vote to alert their announcer that they are switching and its totally fine.

This means that the DNC's Roll Call vote is fluid, until it is over there's no way to say with 100% certainty who the nominee will be. Thus, it's interesting that there's talk that the Roll Call should have gone to Bernie.

x2501x ago

I listened to the whole thing on C-SPAN, and they were giving a running tally the whole time. Clinton very clearly won, so I don't know what kind of BS this article is spewing. There only was one vote so was does "first Roll Call" even mean?

x2501x ago

Oh, wait I see what they're talking about. The "AM Roll Call" was a fucking rehearsal of how they would do it later, which is why it wasn't counted. If people are too ignorant of the process to have understood that, then they honestly don't deserve any better than they're getting. Knowing the rules is a big part of winning the game.

Sciency ago

Yup. AM rollcall is just there to give the people behind the curtain enough time to pay off anyone who might ruin their plans.

SenecaTheYounger ago

Yeah, that's my confusion, cause I semi watched it (muted on a different screen so I could jump in and out) and don't recall two votes...that would have taken the whole damn night!

MyDrunkAccount ago

Huh. What a truly fucked system. So in essence, at least as it appears, the primary vote is nothing more than a formal national poll for the DNC. lol.

Thank you so much for your response, it was very well written.

x2501x ago

That's not exactly right. On the first ballot, all the delegates except the Super Delegates are bound to vote in a way that reflects how they were apportioned by the voters in their states. Some states' rules say that their delegates can be free to vote however they want if there is more than one round at the convention, and some states' rules say that delegates may only vote for a different candidate if the one for whom they are pledged is eliminated. That all only really matters if there's more than two candidates and none of them has a majority on the first ballot.

SenecaTheYounger ago

thanks for clarifying and adding the rest here, I didn't really think to explain additional rounds of voting.