How is the voting done?
The two parties are different. When there is a race to be decided, everyone at a Republican meeting drops a name of a candidate in a hat, and the results are tabulated in Des Moines and reported to the media. The Democrats’ process is more complicated. While Republicans have one-person, one-vote, Democrats vote for delegates for each candidate. At 7 p.m., Democrats will break into what are called “preference groups,” where participants’ preferences for a candidate become public. All the supporters of Hillary Clinton will go to one corner, all the supporters of Barack Obama to another, etc. If a candidate doesn’t have 15 percent of the total, his or her supporters must realign with another group. Once everyone is in a group with at least 15 percent, delegates to the county convention are apportioned based on the size of the preference group. So, for example, if the precinct sends 10 delegates to the county convention, those 10 delegates are allocated based on the percentage of people in
