I know everyone is sick of the Iowa caucus. But many people spent countless hours doing hard work in Iowa and people spent hours to caucus for their candidates. Those people deserve to have their votes counted correctly. Especially in an election as close as this one, where Buttigieg ended up winning the official count by only 2 State Delegate Equivalents (SDE) over Bernie Sanders.
There seem to be numerous cases of how wrong rounding effected the number of SDE a candidate got in a certain precinct. Now to be clear, not all of these cases were just Sanders getting screwed, though they do seem to be the majority of what has been found so far.
The Sanders Campaign has now released 14 cases, where SDE were wrongly given to other candidates instead of Sanders, due to easy to make rounding errors. In some of these cases those SDE were given to Buttigieg, thus making the swing in favor of Sanders even higher.
In the picture at the top of the diary you can look into all of those cases yourself. But i will shortly explain what generally went wrong with the case of Precinct Des Moines 80, since it looks to be a very perfect example of just how badly it all went.
To calculate the number of SDE a candidate won in a precinct you use a very simple formula: Number of votes a candidate got in the precinct times the number of SDE that precinct is worth. Then you divide that number by the total number of voters that were at that particular caucus. The resulting number will almost never be a whole number, but instead something like 1.435 SDE.
So that number is step 1. once you have that you go onto step 2, which is just simple rounding. 0.5 gets rounded up, and lower gets rounded down. we all know that, its very easy.
Now you might be finished there. But often a step 3 is required and this is where these errors occurred. After step 2 what was often the case was, that the rounded numbers for all candidates were less than the total number of SDE that were at play in a precinct. So after rounding you may have 7 SDE, but the precinct was worth 8. So you have a step 3 of adjustment. and it is a complicated step and so i will now start working with the Des Moines 80 precinct example numbers to help Illustrate. (www.popularmechanics.com/...)
As you can see Biden got 2.00 SDE, Buttigieg 2.75, Sanders 4.21 and there was 1.04 for others.
So after the first round of rounding Biden gets 2 SDE, Buttigieg gets 3 and Sanders gets 4. Thats 9 SDE accounted for now, but Des Moines 80 was worth 10 SDE (the others basically, who were below the threshold).
Now in the official report it was rounded with Biden getting 2 SDE, Buttigieg getting 4 and Sanders also getting 4. But this was wrong, because in the adjustment phase of rounding the SDE goes to the candidate who is closest to their next delegate number from their original SDE calculation. For biden his next delegate number is 3, since he already had 2, for Buttigieg its 4 since he already had 3 and for Sanders its 5 since he already had 4. So since Biden had 2.00 originally he needed 1.00 to round up to 3. Bernie had a 4.21 so he needed 0.79 to round up to his next delegate number of 5. And Buttigieg originally had 2.75 so he needed 1.25 to round up to his next delegate number of 4. So Bernie needed the lowest amount to get to his needed number.
And this is where the fuck up occurred, because i suspect the people responsible only thought Buttigieg needed 0.25, because it seems natural to just round to the next natural number rather than the next delegate number not already awarded.
I hope my explanation made sense, its pretty complex stuff. But as we can see in Des Moines 80, the SDE should have been 2 for Biden, 3 for Buttigieg and 5 for Sanders. So if this precinct alone was calculated correctly Bernie and Buttigieg would already have the same number of SDE statewide. And this mistake kept happening all over the state, and as far as can be seen right now its been mostly to the disadvantage of Sanders.
Yes its getting annoying how many mistakes there are in Iowa, but I do think it is important to try and actually make sure that the votes were counted correctly. That is after all the core of what the democratic process is about.