Need some help from someone from Iowa

[tiredtoo]

Please help me understand how the leader in popular votes gets less delegates than the 2nd place finisher?
Is there some special method you use to make one person's vote more important than anothers?
Waiting quietly for your reply, thank you.
Vote Blue no matter who.

[4139]

1. It is an 'electoral college' type system, just like trump got elected

[tiredtoo]

4. So a "rigged" system. Thanks EOM

[jmg257]

2. This was a pretty good read on the what why and hows...

"Let’s return, then, to our final vote total above: Biden 32, Sanders 28, Warren 24, and Buttigieg 16. And let’s say this result came in the Fourth Precinct in Adair County. How does that translate to delegate results?

Well, party officials consult a master delegate apportionment list from Iowa Democrats to calculate. Here’s the relevant bit:

First off, this particular precinct will choose 10 county convention delegates.
To get the county convention delegate result, then, you apply the final vote total proportionally and round where necessary.
Here, Biden’s 32 supporters get him three delegates, Sanders’s 28 get him three delegates, Warren’s 24 get her two delegates, and Buttigieg’s 16 also get him two delegates.
But then we have to change those county delegates to state delegate equivalents.
And it turns out that this precinct’s 10 county delegates would be worth, together, 0.78 of a state delegate.
So Biden and Sanders each get three-tenths of that (0.234 state delegate equivalents), Warren and Buttigieg would get two-tenths each (0.156 state delegate equivalents),
Those, then, are the state delegate equivalent results for this precinct.
...

[Fresh_Start]

3. a caucus vote is not equal to a primary vote or a general election vote

because caucus voters are a surrogate for the voting population.

image two equal sized districts with the same number of delegates to allocate
but one district has 2x as many people caucusing

district A 10,000 voters = 4 delegates, 100 caucusees. each caucusee vote = 4/100 of delegate

district B 10,000 voters, 4 delegates, 200 caucusees. each caucusee vote = 4/200 of a delegate

the alternative would be egregiously unfair.

imagine a state with 1,000,000 actual voters distributed over 100 districts and 100 delegates with one delegate per 1000 voters.

imagine each district has 1000 actual voters because all the districts are equal in size.

if you allocated based on caucusee rather than actual voters...it would be possible for that caucus to capture virtually 100% of the delegates even though that district was only entitled to one delegate based on voter distribution.

District 1 our greedy district gets 100% of its voters to caucus
All of the other districts get 2% of their voters to caucus.

So there would be 1000 + 99*2 caucuseer = 1198 in total
if 100% of district 1 voted for candidate A that candidate would have 1000 votes
if all of the other districts voted 100% for candidate B, then candidate B would have 198 votes.

So 1000 caucusee votes for candidate A get a total of 1 delegate because that is all district 1 is allocated based on the statewide number of voters
So 198 votes for candidate B get a total of 99 delegates, because each of those other districts gave 100% of their support to candidate B.

If however the system gave candidate A 84% of the candidates and all other districts a total of 16% of the candidates, then voters in every district but the greedy district would devalued in the system