I was pretty bad at math when I was a kid, which is probably because I sat in the back of the room reading books instead of listening to the teacher. But still, I learned rounding and am pretty sure that you don't round up at "4". Tie goes to the runner at 5, sure, assuming the runner is "up" and the fielder is "down", but at "4" you round down.
So how does a 9.4 percent margin of victory for Hillary Clinton become a double digit win? The magic of multiple rounding.
According to the NY Times on this page Hillary Clinton won 54.7 percent of the vote and Barack Obama won 45.3 percent of the vote, for a tidy Clinton win of 9.4 percent.
But when you get to this page that lists all the primaries and caucuses to date, the first round of rounding kicks in. 54.7 percent becomes 55 percent, and 45.3 percent becomes 45 percent.
Somehow Clinton's margin gains .6 percent of the vote that she didn't actually get, and gets to crow about having a double digit win that she also didn't actually get.
Zero point six percent of the vote may not sound like much, but it is 138,033 votes. That's a lot of Barack Obama voters who have been shifted through the magic of rounding to the Hillary Clinton column.
Newspapers are supposed to report the facts, and not spin things to the benefit of one side or the other. The New York Times is in no way alone in granting Hillary Clinton an extra .6 percent of the vote, or giving her the talking point she did not earn of having a double digit win.
And it's worse in the television, where they don't discuss the decimal points at all but just report a "10 point win for Hillary Clinton." That "10 point" or "double digit" win is a hell of a lot more powerful than a "9.4 percent" or "single digit" win as a theme for the Clinton campaign.
Were I a conspiracy buff, which I'm not, I would suggest that this was because the papers want to keep the race going either to sell more ads or to screw the Democrats. The former is more likely, I guess, but really I think it's just abject laziness.