slate.msn.com/id/2094034
Three years ago, the United States was preparing to inaugurate a president who had lost the popular vote. Bush had parlayed his defeat in the national ballot count into a razor-thin victory in the Electoral College. Even Bushs edge in the delegate tally was in doubt, since a photo finish in the pivotal jurisdiction, Florida, required an official recount that was never systematically conducted or completed. This time, the vote isnt national or final, but it will go a long way toward determining the alternative to Bush in November 2004. More than 100,000 Democrats will go to precinct caucuses to select a nominee for president. Continue Article If you like the Electoral College, youll love the Iowa Democratic caucuses. You meet in a room with all the other registered Democrats in your precinct who decide to show up. First you have to choose local party officers and sit through a lot of talk about party activities. Then the caucus chair asks everybody to express their preferences among the presidential candidates. She tells the Howard Dean people to stand in this corner, the Dick Gephardt people in that corner, the John Kerry people in the other corner, etc. The party has a viability rule: If your group doesnt add up to a sufficient percentage of the total vote in the roomat least 15 percent, but it can go higher, depending on various factorsthe chair will declare your group nonviable. Now you have to choose which of the viable candidates you prefer as a second choice. Other Kucinich supporters and Wes Clark supporters, and supporters of any other nonviable candidate go to other corners, depending on whom they prefer. First, the number of delegates to be distributed in the room depends on how many Democrats voted in your precinct in the most recent gubernatorial and presidential elections. If youre new in town, and the turnout in your precinct was lousy four years ago, your vote effectively counts less than it would have if youd moved to a high-turnout precinct. Second, if your group is bigger than another group in the room, that doesnt guarantee youll get more delegates. Lets say the chair has six delegates to distribute, and there are four viable groups. That leaves two extra delegates, which will probably go to the two biggest groups. If youre in the third-biggest group, and youve got more people than the fourth group does, tough luck. The precinct chair phones the county Democratic Party and reports how many county delegates have been awarded to each candidate or to uncommitted in your precinct. The chair also calculates how many state delegates the ber-delegates who will be chosen by the county delegates each candidate would probably get based on his number of county delegates. On caucus night, the Iowa Democratic Party will release the delegate count. Heres when the party will release the raw vote count and the realigned vote count: Never. The party wont compile or even record them, except as a temporary step in most precincts so that the caucus chair can determine how many delegates each candidate gets. The party doesnt want raw votes compiled and released, because it wants the caucuses to be a collaborative activity, not a tally of individual preferences. Thats all well and good, if you like the partys communitarian version of democracy. But if you want to know how many voters stood up for John Edwards, youre out of luck. This wasnt a problem four years ago, because Al Gore thumped Bill Bradley in the Iowa delegate count by a 2-1 margin. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, was such a prohibitive favorite that other Democrats skipped the caucuses. To create a dangerously high risk that the winner of the delegate count isnt the winner of the raw vote, you need two things: a big field, so that there will be plenty of nonviable groups to redistribute at the precinct caucuses, and a close race. You have to go all the way back to 1988 to find an Iowa Democratic presidential contest in which both of those factors applied.
A media consortium called the News Election Service said he did, by three percentage points. But four months later, an article revealed that the NES had reported vote counts from only 70 percent of the caucuses and had botched so many of those that its numbers couldnt be trusted. A separate caucus-night projection by NBC News, aborted and never disclosed on air, had Gephardt leading by only half a percentage point. Given the closeness of the race, there was no way to know whether, when Iowans stood up to be counted, Gephardt got the most votes. The latest Iowa polls have the top four candidatesDean, Gephardt, Kerry, and Edwards within the margin of error . Heres the system the media have created to replace the NES: Nothing. Plenty of reporters will attend caucuses, but nobody is systematically reporting the raw vote, or even the realigned vote. Some folks at the TV networks seem to think the Associated Press is reporting the raw vote. If the winner anointed by the media is determined by the delegate count rather than the raw count, whos likely to get screwed? Edwards is hovering just above 15 percent in most statewide surveys. That means that in a lot of precincts, his supporters are likely to fall just below the viability threshold and be disbanded, earning zero delegates. Dean could be shortchanged by the turnout-based allotment of delegates to each precinct. If, as advertised, Dean brings in people who had previously given up on voting, the low turnout caused by their absence from the last election in that precinct will diminish the number of delegates they can earn in this election, no matter how many of them show up. The TV networks will have one way to estimate the raw vote: entrance polls . As Democrats enter the caucuses, Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International will ask them, among other things, whom they plan to vote for. An official at one network said her organization would use the entrance polls to help project the winner. Thats exactly what the entrance polls shouldnt be used for, according to Warren Mitofsky, one of the executives whos supervising them. But absent a raw vote count, it would be surprising if network analysts responsible for projecting the winner didnt look at the entrance polls, if only to see whether they matched the delegate count. Why are the people who conduct the entrance polls nervous about using them to project winners? Networks initially called the state for Gore based largely on exit polls. As the returns came in, the networks realized that the exit polls were off. Then came more returns, and a half-baked official recount, and a court fight, and a contested inauguration, and finally a too-late unofficial media recount that showed Bush winning under some rules and Gore winning under others. William Saletan is Slate s chief political correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War . Photograph of a John Edwards campaign stop on the Slate home page by Jason Reed/Reuters.
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