How does Presidential and Delegate Voting Work?

The first item on your ballot will be voting for your favorite presidential candidate.  This is the vote that determines how many delegates your candidate will receive in your district.  For example, if your candidate receives 40% of the vote, he or she will receive at least 40% of the delegates.  However, any candidate that receives less than 15% of the vote will not receive any delegates.

The second vote is your vote for delegates.  This vote determines which delegates will go to the Democratic National Convention to represent each candidate.  The delegate candidates are pledged to a specific presidential candidate.  Each delegate candidate will be listed on the ballot with the last name of his or her respective presidential candidate in parentheses.  The delegate candidates who receive the highest number of votes for each presidential candidate that qualifies will go to convention, subject to gender balancing requirements.

Naperville Township has only 2 Congressional Districts (6^th and 11^th).  Your ballot will say “Vote for up to 5 delegates” if you live in the 11^th Congressional District or “Vote for up to 6 delegates” if you live in the 6^th Congressional District.  Three female delegates will be elected from each district, with the remaining delegates in each district being male.  You can choose to only vote for delegates for your preferred presidential candidate or you can vote for delegates for more than one presidential candidate as long as you do not vote for more than the allowed total amount of delegates.  This will not affect how many delegates your candidate gets.  It only determines which delegates for each candidate will go to convention.

For example if you live in the 11^th Congressional District, if you do not know any of the delegates and do not care which ones go to convention, your best strategy would be to vote for all 5 delegates for your presidential candidate.  However, if you favor some of the delegate candidates over the others, your best strategy would be to vote only for those you prefer.  Let’s say you prefer 2 of the delegate candidates for presidential candidate X and 2 of the delegate candidates for presidential candidate Y and have no opinion about the remaining delegate candidates.  You can vote for all 4 of your preferred delegate candidates and skip voting for a 5^th candidate.  This makes it more likely the delegate candidates you like will be elected to represent their respective presidential candidate at convention.  For example, if candidate X is entitled to 40% of the delegates based on the presidential vote, he will be allotted 2 out of 5 delegates.  The 2 pledged delegates with the highest number of votes will be elected to represent that candidate, subject to gender balancing requirements.