EXAMPLE 1 Proportionally Awarding Delegates in the Democratic Primary
The New Hampshire primary is the first primary after the Iowa caucuses. For the 2008 Democratic primary, New Hampshire was divided into two districts, each with seven delegates. Of the 21 candidates who received votes in District 2, the top five vote getters were Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson. Their vote totals are listed in Table 12.2, and all other candidates who received votes are bundled together under “Others.”
The columns of Table 12.2 demonstrate the steps outlined in the Democratic Delegate Selection Rules (Table 12.1). Following Step 1, the first column contains the percentage of the popular vote for the candidates. For example, Clinton’s percentage of the popular vote is the total number of votes she received (55,418) divided by the total number of votes (146,871); hence, her percentage is . As described in Step 2, all candidates that receive less than 15% of the popular vote are eliminated; these are Kucinich, Richardson, and the candidates collected under the category “Others.” The percentages of the remaining candidates—Clinton, Edwards, and Obama—are adjusted accordingly. This is achieved by discarding the votes for all candidates that failed to meet the 15% threshold. For example, Clinton’s adjusted percentage becomes 40.602 by calculating .
506
| Candidates | Popular Votes |
Percentage of Votes |
Adjusted Votes |
Adjusted Percentage |
Quota | Initial Delegates |
Final Delegates |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hillary Clinton | 55,418 | 37.732 | 55,418 | 40.602 | 2.8421 | 2 | 3 |
| John Edwards | 25,224 | 17.174 | 25,224 | 18.48 | 1.1936 | 1 | 1 |
| Dennis Kucinich | 2,176 | 1.482 | |||||
| Barack Obama | 55,848 | 38.025 | 55,848 | 40.917 | 2.8642 | 2 | 3 |
| Bill Richardson | 7,220 | 4.916 | |||||
| Others | 985 | 0.671 | |||||
| Totals | 146,871 | 100 | 136,490 | 100 | 7 | 5 | 7 |
Steps 3 to 5 are usually referred to as Hamilton’s method, a method of apportionment attributed to U.S. founding father Alexander Hamilton. In Step 3, the remaining candidates’ adjusted percentages are multiplied by 7, the total number of delegates to be awarded in District 2, to calculate their quotas—the proportion of the delegates the candidate should receive given his or her adjusted percentage of the vote. For instance, Clinton’s quota of 2.8421 satisfies .
In Step 4, the quotas are rounded down to give an initial apportionment of 2, 1, and 2 delegates, respectively, for Clinton, Edwards, and Obama. For example, Clinton’s quota of 2.8421 is rounded down to 2. As a consequence, Step 4 awards the first delegates, meaning that there are 2 delegates left to allocate. In Step 5, the remaining 2 delegates are awarded to the candidates with the largest fractional/decimal remainders. Obama has the largest decimal remainder of . Clinton’s remainder is the second highest. It follows that both Obama and Clinton receive an extra delegate, rounding their delegate totals to 3 each. The final delegate counts for District 2 of the 2008 New Hampshire Democratic primary are 3 delegates each to Clinton and Obama and 1 delegate to Edwards.