Despite Media Hype, Iowa's Democratic Caucuses Will Have No True Winner

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted December 30, 2007.

For weeks, critics have said the Iowa Caucuses are less than democratic. They exclude elderly and disabled voters who can't get there. The same is true for soldiers overseas and college students on winter break. They are in a state that is mostly white. And contrary to the national media hype, there is no clear winner -- at least on the Democratic side -- that commits delegates for the party's national convention.

All that is true. But the Iowa Caucuses are really useful if you follow politics. Yet most of the national media won't cover that part of the process. And the state's Democratic Party is not helping either, by not releasing the raw data of the sequence of votes on Caucus Night. Those votes -- and the debate and compromises that go with it -- could inject some realism and perspective into the rest of the campaign.

Because unlike any other state, what the Iowa Caucuses offer is the chance to see people deciding whom to pick after their first choice for president does not make it in the first round of voting. That forced compromise and the debate accompanying it -- coming at the start of the presidential season -- is close to how people vote on Election Day.

"The caucuses were never designed to have a winner," said Doug Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist who is one of the nation's leading experts on electronic voting. "Fights about who won are a matter of interpretation, since the caucuses elect delegates to the county conventions, who elect delegates to the state and congressional district elections, who elect delegates to the national party conventions."

On the Republican side, that party conducts a straw poll on Caucus Night and releases the raw numbers. They also elect delegates to county conventions. But the Democrats have another system, Jones said, and one whose nuances are little-understood -- especially by most of the political reporters now in the state.

"For the Democrats, the caucuses are not about giving raw popularity numbers, they are about forcing people to make compromises and play politics," he said. "In a way, they accomplish the kinds of things that instant runoff voting accomplishes, but do so through social mechanisms instead of mathematical computation."

Instant runoff voting, which exists in some cites and states, ranks candidates. If there's no clear winner with more than 50 percent, then candidates with the fewest votes get taken out of the mix. When that happens, their supporters' second choice gets counted for one of the remaining candidates until someone has a majority. Iowa's Democratic caucuses are like that. If a candidate does not get 15 percent of the vote, that candidate's people must vote for someone else. That compromise -- that part of the process -- is what is valuable for the rest of the country.

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Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election, with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).

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