Super Tuesday: The day when the most states hold their presidential primaries — 15 states to be exact. More than a third of all delegates in the Democratic primary are in play on Super Tuesday, a grand total of 1,357.
“Super Tuesday,” Amber Phillips of the Washington Post notes, “is a popular day to hold a primary because so many states want an early say in who gets the nomination.” While Democratic primary voters will cast ballots for their preferred candidates, it’s the total number of delegates that matter in the primary race. Delegates are apportioned based on the percentage of votes a candidate receives in a particular state, and candidates must meet the required threshold of 15% in a state to receive delegates.
The Romans, too, had a system of proportional voting, though theirs (in part) involved the idea of voting units. In the first century B.C., the Roman Republic had two main assemblies in which the people exercised voting prerogatives, the comitia centuriata and the comitia tributa. The comitia centuriata, or Centuriate Assembly, was primarily tasked with electing higher magistrates, such as consuls, praetors, and censors, and making declarations of war. It was originally structured to mirror the military organization of the Roman army, and rather than one-man-one-vote democracy, the assembly functioned via voting units, centuraie — or “centuries.”
As University College London’s Valentia Arena helpfully explains, “The majority of votes within one unit counted as the outcome of that unit, and in turn, the majority of units constituted the final outcome of the voting. The people were divided in classes by the census, traditionally on the basis of their financial ability to arm themselves. Each class within the census was assigned a designated number of centuriae — the higher the census class, the higher the number of centuriae that class held.”
In his De Re Publica (On the Commonwealth), Cicero records that the Roman people were distributed by the Roman King Servius Tullius into six classes, whose total elective force in the comitia centuriata was 193 centuries. According to Cicero, such an organization represented an anti-majoritarian belief that “the greatest number should not have the greatest power.” Rather, “the majority of votes was in the hands of those to whom the highest welfare of the commonwealth was the most important.”
I’m sure the Bernie Bros would be on board with this.
