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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Thursday, March 03, 2016 :::
Okay, here's a beaut from the New York Times; apparently the state law of New Hampshire specifies that
The secretary of state shall apportion delegates to the national party conventions among the candidates voted for at the presidential primary by determining the proportion of the number of votes cast for each presidential candidate to the total votes cast for all presidential candidates of the same political party, rounded to the nearest whole number.
It seems to me that the obvious extremely literal way to read this is that, well, the proportion of the number of votes cast for each Republican candidate to the total votes cast for Republican candidates was less than one half, and therefore rounds to 0. This would therefore allocate no delegates; later clauses would essentially make New Hampshire a winner-takes-all state in all circumstances. This would be a convoluted way of writing that; it looks like they were trying instead to write the rule that I thought a month ago that they were using, in which what is being rounded to the nearest whole number is the number of delegates apportioned, rather than the fraction of the vote received. (This is what the Secretary of State actually did at this election.) Apparently, though, the media and its experts had (as far as I can tell) substituted the word "percentage" for "number" in the above passage to make it read differently from a convoluted "winner-take-all" rule but an even stranger rule in which candidates were awarded fractional delegates based on rounded percentages — which they then presumed would be rounded off again, even though the law makes no provision for this. (Presumably rounding off the number of delegates at the end seems more natural than some other means of getting an integer.)
::: posted by dWj at 9:55 AM
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