By: Conner Williams Editor in Chief
If you were confused by what went on this week at the Iowa Caucus, you’re not alone.
Frankly, the system is completely absurd. Let’s take a look at some of the specifics of what a caucus is and how they work.
First, two states have caucuses in place of the voting systems that the other states have. Those two are Iowa and New Hampshire, the latter of which starts this coming Tuesday, Feb. 9.
Iowa has a multistep process for choosing the delegates that are the ones who actually cast the votes that count towards the candidate for the state. The state had a turnout of 171,508 caucus-goers – the second-highest turnout in history behind the 2008 election – and was divided up into 1,683 precincts, which in total will send 11,065 delegates to the county conventions on March 12. Those 11,065 delegates then get cut down to 1,406 to attend congressional district on April 30 and state conventions on June 18.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton narrowly edged out Bernie Sanders by a margin of less than one-half of a percentage point; Clinton came in at 49.9 percent of the caucus votes (701), while Sanders hauled in 49.6 percent (697). Martin O’Malley took in the remaining eight delegates for the grand total of 1,406 that was mentioned earlier. The split between Sanders and Clinton is reportedly the closest result in the 40 years of the Iowa Caucus.
But what do those numbers actually mean? Well, it’s a bit confusing, so hang in there.
Those figures represent estimates of how many delegates will attend the congressional district and state conventions. The percentage points are actually “state delegate equivalents,” as National Public Radio reported.
Because the split between Clinton and Sanders was so close, the state had to resort to its unusually odd and improbable method of tiebreaking: coin flips.
And you can bet that there was a significant amount of controversy over the coin tosses that were used as tie breakers to award delegates for precincts that had an odd number of delegates – and yes, I know what you’re thinking: our highly advanced democratic system employs coin tosses to decide who wins votes? Yes, yes it does.
NPR gave a fantastic example of a hypothetical situation. Say a precinct has 5 delegates to award. The voters for that precinct are split evenly between Sander and Clinton. If it were a precinct with an even number of delegates, they would be divided up evenly down the middle, with half going to Clinton and half to Sanders. But in a precinct with an odd number of delegates – this one with five, for example – a coin toss is used to decide who gets that last one.
There were reportedly six precincts in which the decision for awarding delegates was so tight that they had to be decided with coin tosses. Six tosses, and Clinton won all of them, which is a one in 64 chance of occurring.
But those were just initial reports from The De Moines Register; the narrative has been updated to say that there were many more coin tosses, and Sanders won “at least half of them.” But that still doesn’t change the fact that we’re using the flip of a coin as part of our democratic system.
Despite the outcry over the situation, the coin tosses were for county delegates, not for the state. There is still a long way to go, and with the way things have happened thus far, who knows what could happen in the coming months.
