It’s complicated but easy if you have patient to read all of this.
Iowa is sending 41 delegates to the national democratic convention that will be in Denver this summer. Iowa has 99 counties and each county is having a County Convention to elect the number of delegates assigned to it based on its size. Each county is divided into precinct and each precinct is assigned a number of delegates to the county convention, again based on its size.
At the night of the caucuses people are gathering together in each precinct. At a certain point the doors are closed and the total number of people in the precinct is calculated. For example in my precinct we had 750 people. The next stage is for everyone to move to the area of the room that is assigned to the candidate he or she is supporting. This is stage one. In order to move to stage two the number of people in each group is counted and there must be at least 15% of the total number for this group to be viable and move to stage two. In my case if was 113 people and the groups supporting Obama, Clinton and Edwards were the only viable groups with about 600 people all together. So now there are 150 people whose candidate is out and they can either go home or join another group. In addition each viable candidate is trying to get these people to move to his/her group. This stage two is taking 30 minutes and is the fun part of the evening. A lot of debates and persuasions is going around. After 30 minutes, there is a re-count of each viable group and the winner is announced. In my precinct is was Obama with 6 delegates (out of 11), Edwards with 3 delegates and Clinton with 2 delegates.
What you get in the media Is basically the total percentage that each candidate got in the whole state in which Obama got 38%.
Complicated? Do you think it will work in Israel? Probably not!!
הגב לתגובה זו