Longboat Key, FL–If the government announced, “Sorry folks, no presidential election this year,” Americans would take to the streets and blood would spill. But deny a substantial chunk of voters a chance to participate in a key part of that election, the nominating process, and the reaction is muted at best.

In the months I’ve spent talking to Floridians, many of them politically active, not one has volunteered a complaint about being stripped of votes at the Democratic National Convention.

My hunch is that responsibility for the Florida fiasco is spread so widely that voters by and large are unsure about who should be faulted. It’s as though, when multiple cooks spoil the broth, the collective fault for the outcome keeps the focus away from anyone in particular.

In the two states faced with loss of votes at the Democratic National Convention, Michigan and Florida, it was state legislators in both places who voted to move the state nominating primaries to Jan. 29 in violation of national party rules intended to make Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina the earliest voting states. So clearly, state lawmakers are the culprits.

But wait. Iowa and the other three favored states then took it upon themselves to insist that the Democratic presidential candidates boycott Michigan and Florida for campaign purposes. They successfully coerced candidates to approve a pledge that barred them from “purchasing media or campaign advocacy of any kind, attending or hosting events of more than 200 people…and employing staff in the state in question….”

In other words, candidates agreed to muzzle themselves. One of them, Barack Obama, even took his name off the Michigan primary ballot.

In muzzling themselves, the candidates also muzzled the press, which avoided questioning the candidates when they showed up for permissible fund-raisers in the two pariah states.

The press should have protested long and loud, on free speech grounds, the no-speech pledge demanded by Iowa and its cohorts. And the press should have insisted on questioning candidates wherever they appeared. The failure to do so in Michigan and Florida surely discouraged the candidates from challenging the misbegotten pledge and it no doubt emboldened the earliest-voting states to throw their weight around.

The press thus compounded its earlier error of inflating the importance of Iowa’s caucuses by giving them excessive coverage while soft-pedaling their significant flaws.

Florida has more then 4 million registered Democratic voters. Iowa has just some 600,000. It would be a travesty of massive proportions if Iowans who had access to the candidates for years as they criss-crossed the state will have all of its delegates counted at the national convention while Florida is slated to get none, in addition to having been barred from direct access to the presidential campaigns.

It’s beyond bizarre that Iowa should be lecturing anybody on proper election etiquette. Its caucuses are thoroughly undemocratic, disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters, including even members of the armed forces, by insisting that only persons physically present can vote (“there will be no absentee or proxy voting at any precinct caucus for any reason”). Iowans who do manage to attend the caucuses are denied a secret ballot. Nor are their votes counted in a way that reliably reflects how many supported each candidate.

Florida’s and Michigan’s crime was to want their citizens to have a meaningful say in the choice of presidential nominees. Punishing the voters in both states for that, by neutering them, is overkill. If Democrats want to attack a really grievous flaw in the nominating process they should remove their blinders and take an unsparing look at what goes on in their leadoff state.