2) The Rules & Bylaws Committee did NOT determine the delegate allocation

There is no provision in the Democratic Party Charter or Bylaws to enable party committees to determine the delegate allocation per nominee, even though it would be perfectly legal (see point 1 above) to do so if they wished.

The delegate allocation is decided by the STATE and presented to the DNC. In fact, in order to maintain parity with other states and historical precedent, the ONLY reasonable choice available to the RBC to fairly seat the delegates was to accept the allocation presented to them by the state party representatives for each state.

In the case of the RBC meeting held yesterday to determine the fate of MI & FL delegates, the RBC voted to accept the allocation presented by each state, having established (as they are required to do) that the state representatives have acted in good faith to determine an allocation that is fair and reasonable.

Furthermore, there is no precedent or provision to allow a candidate or their official representatives to determine the allocation process.  Had the RBC chosen to follow the guidelines of a candidate over the recommendation by the state representatives, it would have set an irretrievably dangerous precedent.

Therefore, it is fair to argue that the RBC could NOT have chosen Clinton's proposal in so much as it differed from the state's recommendation even if they had wanted to.

Possibly even more interesting, the posters take on Ickes role on the RBC.  

8) Conflict of Interest

Statements made by Ickes asserted that he was at least in part acting as an official spokesperson and representative for Clinton whilst simultaneously participating in a voting process as a member of the RBC.

While nothing in the DNC rules prevents members of the RBC to hold a private or publicly expressed preference for a candidate, the appointed members of the RBC are required as a matter of course to act solely in the interests of the DNC with respect to upholding the letter and intent of the rules and bylaws so stated. Any alternative agenda could be reasonably considered to be a conflict of interest.

If it had been the intention of the RBC to allow direct representation by candidates on the committee, the rules would have so provided. Furthermore in order to preserve fairness, any such candidate advocate would have to be formally declared as such and potentially be barred from certain votes.

The precedent for this was clear in yesterday's meeting, as representatives from MI & FL were barred from voting on issues relating to their own state.

As such, Ickes explicit assertion that he is an authorized representative of a candidate, and his use of an independent forum to promote that candidate's agenda regardless of the views of the majority, as expressed by his threat to dismiss the majority RBC decision and appeal to Credentials Committee is at best disingenuous, and at worst a blatant abuse of privilege for which he must tender his resignation.

EDIT: On "stolen" votes..

4) No votes were "stolen" In his vociferous arguments, Ickes claimed that the RBC had "stolen" 4 delegates for Clinton and "given" them to Obama However, in order for ANY delegates to be ‘stolen’, those delegates must have been approved in the first place. According to the RBC ruling in effect during the period of the 2008 primary elections in MI & FL, no allocation of delegates whatsoever could be sanctioned. Therefore, the only time that any delegate in either state could possibly be recognized as valid was AFTER yesterday’s acceptance of a majority vote by the RBC to amend its sanctions against MI & FL. As has been shown in (2) above, the decision to allocate MI delegates in a ration of 69 to 59 in favor of Clinton was made by the state party officials, not by the RBC. The RBC carefully considered the arguments placed before it by those officials as to their ‘best efforts’ attempt to deliver a representative (arguably a Fair Reflection) allocation of delegates according to the preferences of the members of the Democratic Party in MI. According to the only measure that counts, the DNC rules & bylaws, Clinton never ‘had’ 73 delegates in Michigan to be taken away. Therefore any claim by Ickes that the allocation was altered can only be valid in the sense that the RBC voted to allow Clinton to receive 69 delegates more than she had before. Also, without an acknowledged ‘fair count’ in MI, since that figure is higher than the 59 to Obama, any concern over bias (given the invalidity of the election) would be in favor of Clinton, not Obama. Furthermore, now that the delegate allocation has been sanctioned by an RBC majority vote, any adjustment of the allocation that might be considered by future committees could be considered as the very interference that Ickes decries.