Well There's Your Problem Right There
Lost in the aftermath of the Chernobyl-level Iowa caucus debacle is a crucial point: Even if the count were not fucked up , we'd still be questioning Iowa's primacy in and centrality to our process of choosing a president. For years, the counts Iowa reported on election night were not raw vote totals but "state delegate equivalents": a somewhat abstracted figure representing the total number of delegates to the state party convention awarded to a particular candidate using a specific mathematical formula. (Not the number of delegates to the national convention, i.e. the count that matters; just the number pledged to the state convention.) In 2016, Hillary Clinton edged Bernie Sanders in this count by 0.3%, giving her a nominal victory. Bernie's crew maintained that he had won more caucus-goers, and if that total were reported, he could reasonably have claimed a victory of his own (or a split decision at worst). But this was ultimately speculative, since the ...