The First Amendment does not give individual members a right to control internal processes of the party, which is expected to nominate Hillary Clinton for president, a U.S. district court in Manhattan ruled recently in a challenge filed by Jeff Kurzon, an attorney and Sanders supporter.
Kuzon charged in court paper’s that the party’s use of superdelegates dilutes the power of the popular vote and sought a court order that would bar them from voting at the convention. The Democratic Party has 713 superdelegates, who include members of Congress and party leaders, and who can vote for the candidate of their choice. Clinton leads Sanders among superdelegates, 602-48.
“An individual’s First Amendment associational rights do not empower him to compel nomination procedures that guarantee his preferred candidate a ‘fair shot’ at winning a party’s nomination,” Judge Paul Oetken wrote in a ruling dated July 18.
Oetken, who noted that the party has “countervailing First Amendment rights – which would be clearly infringed by the injunction that Kurzon seeks in this case,” also rejected a contention by Kurzon that weighting the votes of superdelegates as the Democrats do violates party members’ rights to equal protection of the law. The prohibition on valuing one person’s vote over another does not apply to party nominating conventions, Oetken said.
The court disagreed with Kuzon that use of superdelegates constitutes a breach of contract. Even if rules for selection of delegates could be construed as an enforceable contract, they “are suffused throughout with references to the role of superdelegates and clearly permit their use,” wrote Oetken.
Because of the unlikelihood that Kuzon could succeed on the merits of his challenge, the court declined to determine whether the actions of a national political party constitute state action – a “difficult question,” according to Oetken and a prerequisite for Kuzon to have prevailed on his constitutional claims.
Eighty-five percent of the Democratic Party’s delegates to the convention are pledged, which means they are required to vote for a particular candidate based on the result of their state’s primary or caucus. The remainder are superdelegates.
The party’s rules committee, at the urging of Sanders’ supporters, agreed on Saturday to narrow the pool of superdelegates to elected officials within the party in future nominating contests