TirithRR wrote:
According to the radio while I was driving home, she won 6 coin tosses. But those were not the only 6 coin tosses. A dozen or more existed, which Bernie won some of.
The source I heard stated that there were 6 and only 6 precincts that came up perfectly even and decided to resolve their count via a coin flip, and that Clinton won all 6. It's entirely possible that source was in error, but if not, and each of those flips represented at least one delegate (which I'm kinda assuming else, why not just proportionately assign the voters/delegates, right?), then the delta represented by the flips coming up unevening more than makes up for the difference in delegates.
Ultimately, it's more or less irrelevant, since the delegates are assigned proportionately, and they effectively tied. I'm just pointing out that there's a pretty huge asterisk next to any attempt by Clinton to make hay out of having "won Iowa".
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And, those coin tosses were not directly for those delegates, they were at a different level, and level prior to those delegates, to determine some other division of... what ever they were calling them. A pool much larger than the small pool that was divided up to determine who wins.
Yeah. I'm not sure. But I'd think if they were just portions of voter counts making up a single delegate, they would have simply passed a "X number for Clinton, and X number for Sanders" up to the main count. Seems odd to have each precinct (or whatever) count as *one* of "something", in that case. Again though, it's not like I'm totally up on the calculations used in the Iowa Caucus process. I assume that X number of voters counts as a single delegate to be assigned, with each delegate obviously not capable of being split. I'd assume that the only reason for a coin toss is if the voter pool for a given delegate was perfectly even and it was the only way to determine if that delegate went for Clinton or Sanders. Hence, my assumption that each flip represented one delegate either going to Clinton or Sanders. And if she won 6 out of 6 such flips, and only "won" by 4 delegates, then had the flips come up 3/3, Sanders would have won instead.
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The 6/6 was misleading, and not directly related by number to the 4 delegates of the margin.
I freely admit to making this assumption. But barring someone with greater factual understanding of the process explaining it differently (we're all speculating at this point, right), it does seem like the most logical assumption to make. Again, the only thing that is in discrete "all or nothing" values in the caucus is the delegate assignment. So it seems reasonable to assume that the only reason to flip a coin is if that's the only way to decide if a delegate goes for one candidate or the other. There would be no reason to flip coins for voter counts. They'd just count up the voters and add them to each candidate's tally. I'd assume they'd only flip of the total tally for a given delegate was perfectly even.
If someone has more light to shed though, I'd love to hear more explanation. Again though, my point is more about Clinton not really being able to claim much in terms of "winning" the caucus.