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Editorial: Different rules, same result
Op-Ed · February 11, 2016
It was kind of cool — for a day, at least — to believe West Branch had one of a half-dozen caucus precincts in the entire state with a tie vote broken by a coin flip.
With 1,681 precincts, West Branch 1 Democratic caucus was among one-third of 1 percent of precincts needing a tie-breaker. The political-geek side of us wanted to brag.
Alas, it turns out that one of the sides just had the wrong variable in a formula. Honestly, we don’t know whether it is the Bernie Sanders’ side or Hillary Clinton’s. But Clinton had a 7-5 lead after the coin toss Monday night, and on Tuesday the Iowa Democratic Party changed it to 6-6.
The key variable here is the headcount. The Sanders campaign used the initial headcount from when caucus-goers checked in at the beginning of the night: 218. The Clinton campaign only counted people in viable groups: 214.
Using the different variables, Clinton and her 115 supporters ended up with 6.45 delegates and Sanders and his 99 supporters ended up with 5.45. It was the same numbers after the decimal point that led to someone digging into their pocket for a dead president in an attempt to help someone trying to become a live president.
Now this was county delegates, so the stakes are not so high, but it did show an example of how rounding made Clinton’s lead in the head count so much smaller. Correction: Non-existent.
Interestingly, if both sides use the same variable, whether the 214 or 218, the delegates come out the same, only by different rules.
The Sanders campaign’s interpretation gives their candidate the sixth delegate because of a caucus rounding rule: if both candidate’s delegate numbers after the decimal point are below 0.5, then the highest of the two gets to round up. The Clinton campaign’s interpretation gives Sanders the sixth delegate because of simple math. So it’s not the end, it’s the means we’re trying to figure out.
The Iowa Democratic Party is right now trying to placate both Sanders and Clinton by affirming or correcting the apparently whisker-thin statewide lead for Clinton, so we may not hear back from them to get their interpretation of the rules on a county-level affair.
All in all, it turns out West Branch 1’s Democratic precinct is really part of the 99 percent (an interesting parallel to a Democratic theme regarding the “distribution” of wealth in the country) — but that’s OK.
What we’re really interested in is the fairness of the democratic — little “D” — process for those who take time to participate.
That, right there, is a win. And that’s cool, too.
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