The Rule That Binds

At the center of the furor expected at next week's Democratic Convention is Rule F3-c, which is designed to weed out defectors among the delegates. If adopted by the convention, the rule would bind all delegates to vote on the first ballot for the presidential candidate whom they were elected to support by state caucuses and primaries. According to the proposed rule, a rebellious delegate--for instance, a Carter delegate who wants to vote for Kennedy--could be replaced "at any time up to and including the presidential balloting." In practice, this would mean that the state delegation's chairman, or an emissary for Carter, would disenfranchise the rebel and summon an alternate.

Ironbound Rule F3-c is the product of Democratic reformers' best intentions, a logical outgrowth of their dismay at the chaotic 1968 convention in Chicago, when the mostly male and mostly white delegates chose Hubert Humphrey as their nominee, while Boss Richard Daley jeered at his critics inside the convention hall and his policemen beat antiwar demonstrators outside. To make the nomination process more fairly reflect the wishes of the party's rank and file, the reformers persuaded the National Convention to abolish the unit rule, which allowed all of a state's delegate votes to be cast for a single nominee.

Still, at the 1972 convention in Miami Beach, there was a futile movement, supported by a delegate from Georgia, Governor Jimmy Carter, to break California's winner-take-all primary rule so that disaffected delegates would be free to vote for George McGovern's rivals. Explains a Carter aide today: "We made no bones about our motives. We didn't claim that we were doing the Lord's work."

By 1976, when Hubert Humphrey was challenging Front-Runner Carter, party reformers were pushing for a rule to prevent delegates from disregarding the wishes of the Democratic voters back home. One supporter of the proposed binding rule was Edward Kennedy, who felt that if Carter did not win the nomination, "it would be a real distortion of the expressed will of the working members of the Democratic Party." When the rule was approved by the Democratic National Committee in 1978, it was largely due to the backing of several Kennedy supporters, who are now spearheading the drive to repeal it.

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