Fun With Numbers, Part I: Rewarding the frontrunner
Doing a little Friday night research (since I'm not getting cancer) in vote totals. I can't believe this is the way we want to decide nominees. It's way better than a winner-take-all-delegates approach, but as a supposedly proportional system with allotments based on votes, it hardly lives up to the word.

Column 1 shows the approximate percentage of the raw vote won to date by the 6 highest-performing candidates.

Column 2 shows the percentage of "earned" delegates received to date, those which are allotted proportionally in a way that ties them to the outcome of the state's votes.

Column 3 shows the percentage of total delegates won to date including the super-delegate endorsements.

____________ 1 _____ 2 ______ 3
Kerry .........42.4.....59.1...... 61
Edwards .....26.4.... 20.5..... 17.9
Dean ..........12.6.... 11.9..... 14.2
Clark ..........10.8..... 6.5....... 4.6
Sharpton ......2.7......1.2 ...... 1.3
Kucinich .......2.2...... 0.8...... 0.7

This isn't just a super-delegate problem, even though the whole idea of a superdelegate is disturbing to me. Kerry has received just over 40% of the popular vote to date, but has compiled nearly 60% of the earned delegates awarded so far. Notice that Edwards and Dean combined are nearly tied in popular vote with Kerry (it's about 1.5 million to 1.4 million), but together they would still be behind almost 2 to 1 to Kerry in earned delegates.

Everything from the calendar to the superdelegates to the rules of viability are all designed to get this over with as fast as possible in favor of the establishment favorite. So what is the Democratic Party trying to do now? Drag it out as long as they can to get all the free press.

That's irony, right?

It doesn't look like it will matter this time around, because Kerry will probably win running away. But it wouldn't have to be much closer to be really messy. And one of these days we are going to have a brokered convention and the discrepancies in the system will be all too clear.

But the real disproportion present even now is coming in Part II.