Note: Yesterday's non-political diary went so well, I thought I'd try my hand a purely political one.
I've been watching the American primaries, more or less from the sidelines for months. Mostly, Clinton supporters have been civil. However, recently some seem to have almost completely lost all perspective and capability to do simple mathematics. Now, more than enough people have taken on the obviously flawed math which is necessary to give Clinton a "majority" of votes. (FL/MI included, Obama gets 0 votes from MI, and 4 caucus states are completely ignored.) The fact that people keep parroting this major manipulation of data simply shows to me either how radicalized some Clinton supporters have become, or at very least how far they are willing to lie openly to prevent Obama from getting the nomination.
However, I ran across this rec'ed post today and the mathematical audacity of it completely blew my mind. So much so, that I feel a need to write this post simply to make it clear that that argument (Obama hasn't won a majority of "elected delegates") is completely invalid.
The specific lines in question are as follows:
Reality check. 2029 delegates are needed to win the nomination. [This excludes Michigan and Florida because the DNC is mad at them and so is pretending they are not there on the map]
...
So now we are down to the wire; and at this point, with only two weeks and three states left in the primary process, with 2026 delegates needed to win the nomination Obama has won 1653 pledged delegates. Clinton has won 1499 pledged delegates. That is a difference of 154 pledged delegates. DING DING DING Super Delegate do not count at this time. They only come into play unless the magic number of delegates has not been reached. And although many have declared their choice at this time, they do not represent the will of the people, and are therefore not truly applicable to the pledged delegate state-by -state nominating process.
First and foremost, even Hilary Clinton stated that MI vote doesn't count and that's why she didn't bother to remove her name from the ballot. To claim that suddenly it should matter when no one else's name was on the ballot is dishonest and, to be honest, incredibly slimy. However, that is not my complaint. Rather, my complaint is the fancy mathematical tricks she does in the second part to make it appear that Obama has not won a majority of the delegates elected by "the will of the people."
The magic number 2026 is exactly half of the number of delegates + 1. This is all delegates, including superdelegates. If you are going to concede that superdelegates don't represent the will of the people, or are meaningless, as is done in the above paragraph, you simply cannot use this line as the goal post for who won the nomination.
Why? Well, let's use simple maths to explain it. Let's say we play a game, with 100 tokens. Whoever gets a simple majority of the tokens wins. (The method the tokens are distributed is not discussed here) Therefore, if you end the game with 50 tokens + 1, you win the game. Now, let's say that 10 of those tokens are "special" tokens. Tokens which are not distributed in a way similar to the other 90 tokens. In fact, let's go so far to say that they are given out by an observer of the game to whomever they decide played best. So now, we have two metrics to determine who won the game.
- Who played the game well enough to win 50%+1 of the 90 non-special tokens. Ie. 46 tokens.
- Who played the game well enough to win 50%+1 of the total 100 tokens. Ie. 51 tokens.
Well, if you take the stance that the special observer tokens don't matter, then from your perspective, the person who won 46+ of the non-special tokens actually won the game, regardless of the actions of the observer. If you take the stance that the observer is important and his tokens are part of the game, then you must also agree that whoever won 51+ of the total tokens won the game.
However, if take the stance that 51+ tokens are required to win the game, but the special observer tokens don't matter, then you are actually increasing the bare minimum of tokens required to win from a simple majority (50%) to 55.6% of the non-special tokens. Thus you are, in effect, changing the rules of the game midstream.
Now, the case of this poster is such that because Obama didn't win 2026 of the elected delegates, he doesn't deserve to win the nomination (ie. the game is a tie). However, this would imply that a winner would need to win 2026/3253 = 62.3% of the elected delegates to win the nomination (assuming 3253 as per the wikipedia article). In other words a supermajority. In effect changing the rules of the democratic game after the fact to ensure that it keeps on going. Similarly, since the person disregards the superdelegates as undemocratic, there is absolutely no way to resolve this issue without (in that person's mind) having the superdelegates overthrow the will of the people in either the direction of Obama or Clinton.
Either that, or the primaries would need to be re-run with the hope that someone wins 62.3% of the elected delegates. That is the only way 2026 pledged delegates who are not superdelegates can be reached, and thus "the will of the people" be observed according to this poster. It's just simple math.
1h
-- * Crossposted at 1337hax0r.com