WASHINGTON — John Millin, an ophthalmologist, fits people for glasses and performs cataract operations. Debbie Marquez owns a restaurant whose specialty is chicken enchiladas in creamy jalapeno sauce. Christopher Stampolis is looking for a job now that the industrial recycling company where he worked for the last decade closed.
They share one bond -- late this summer, they will help choose the Democratic presidential nominee at the party's national convention in Denver. When they do, they will be among a group whose ballots will count thousands of times more in the process than those of other Democrats who have gone to the polls.
These are superdelegates, nearly 800 Democratic office-holders and activists who may end up holding the nomination in their hands.
In a campaign season that has defied prediction, the final twist could be this: Although Democratic turnout has been high, shattering records in some states, the odds are good that neither Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton nor Barack Obama will have accumulated enough delegates picked through primaries and caucuses to clinch the nomination. Unless some sort of other deal is brokered, the margin of victory would come from the elite segment of superdelegates.
How powerful are superdelegates? In California, 370 regular delegates were allotted based on the votes of more than 4.5 million people in the state's Feb. 5 primary. That means each of California's 66 superdelegates will cast a convention ballot equivalent to a regular delegate picked by more than 12,000 primary voters.
"This is a device to try to reduce the influence of one-person, one-vote," said Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the watchdog group Public Citizen. "It's anti-democratic. It's specifically designed for the purpose of having the insiders . . . have some sort of final decision over who the nominee is going to be, regardless of what the voters want."
A recent tally by the Associated Press showed Clinton leading Obama in superdelegates by 77. Not all have committed themselves, and they can shift their allegiance at any time.
Some of the superdelegates are professional politicians; 27 governors are among them, as well as every Democratic member of Congress -- including Rep. William J. Jefferson of Louisiana, indicted last year on corruption charges following an FBI raid that found $90,000 in a home freezer.
