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One person, one vote. So simple — yet, in America, seemingly impossible to achieve.

Here we are in the midst of another intense election season in the strongest democracy in the world, routinely disenfranchising voters — all under various guises of rules and propriety, yet all sounding more like the brute use of raw political power. The will of the people has been subjugated to the will of the deciders, be they Democratic Party officials or Supreme Court justices.

We saw it in the "caging" of thousands of black voters, who were summarily removed from the rolls in Florida in 2000 — an election ultimately decided not by millions, thousands or even hundreds of votes, but by five votes on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Likewise in Ohio in 2004, when thousands of voters were turned away because their names had been removed from voting rolls and where suspect voting machines produced tallies that were perplexing at best.

Depending on who writes the narratives, those presidential elections were stolen or were won fair and square.

In New Mexico on Tuesday, who knows how many frustrated Democratic voters surrendered their franchise and left crowded voting sites, where the wait was as long as three hours because of insufficient equipment, too few poll workers and incredibly poor planning?

Elsewhere on the national scene this week, Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Sen. Barack Obama is looking down the road at an apparent delegate deficit and has begun to raise questions about the so-called "super delegates" — hundreds of Democratic officials who are automatic delegates to the Democratic nominating convention this year. Obama's fear: They ultimately have and may use the power to decide the party's nominee in a deadlocked convention.

On the edge of possibly being the first black presidential nominee in American history, Obama warned party brass that if he wins the most primary delegates — but not the majority needed for the nomination — they had better not give their votes to his rival, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton.

The majority of super delegates, of course, are party loyalists, and most already were pledged to Clinton, who likewise is in the unprecedented position of potentially being the first female presidential nominee in American history.

She, in turn, is joining hands with disenfranchised Democrats in Florida and Michigan, who voted in their state primaries in January, but whose votes were cast in vain. Not surprisingly, Clinton carried both states. But officially the votes have been dismissed by the Democratic National Committee, which has insisted on penalizing the two states whose Republican-controlled legislatures moved up their Democratic primaries ahead of last week's Super Tuesday, against the wishes of the Democratic Party brass.

Which leads to the question: If American rights are God-given and inalienable, and voting is the foundational right of a democracy, who made the Democratic National Committee God?

At stake are 341 Democratic delegates, representing voters in Florida and Michigan, whose combined population is 28 million. Their votes are slated to be lost in a process that will give more credence, legitimacy and political power to the 12 Democratic delegates seated from Pacific Island of Guam, population 173,456.

The Democratic Party, presumably the party of the people, has an enormous philosophical problem and is in a most difficult predicament on both fronts.

The best answer is the fair and obvious one. The party really has no choice. It must seat the Michigan and Florida delegates. And it should encourage super delegates to reflect the primary voters of their states or, in the case of proportional delegate representation, the primary voters in their states, districts or cities that each super delegate represents.

Let the people — in this case, Democratic primary voters — decide who their nominee should be, not the party. It's as simple as one person, one vote.