Super Tuesday!

Tonight, for the first time in my life, I'll be attending a caucus to help decide the fate of a nation. Well, not personally deciding, and I'm not enrolled for Minneapolis, but I digress.

See, the American political system is a vast and arcane thing, with complexity possibly on the level of, oh I don't know, discovering a unified field theory.

Before the election even happens, each party must choose a candidate. These candidates campaign against each other prior to the real election, and registered party members get to decide who they want to represent them. However, it's more complicated. Each state is given a certain number of delegates, and a candidate needs the majority of delegates nationally to gain the nomination. The Republican party has a "winner take all" system, where whoever gets the highest percentage of votes gets all the delegates. The Democrats have a proportional system, where the percentage of votes equals the percentage of delegates. And 24 of the states do this deciding today, on Super Tuesday. Which means by the end of today, we'll probably have a Republican candidate. But maybe not a Democrat. The race is so close between Clinton and Obama, that even once everything's been tallied, it could still be very, very close. At which point we'd have to wait for the remaining states, or one of the other, lesser candidates to commit his delegates to one of them.

Of course, some shit is even more complicated than that. Two states (New Hampshire and somewhere else, I don't remember) decided that they wanted to hold their primaries earlier on in the year, to make them seem cool and important. Democratic Party said "No, you can't do that, or else everyone will do it, and it'll just get fucking crazy". The states said "Tough titties" and so the Democratic Party isn't accepting those delegates as being valid.

On top of that, some of the states aren't required to give their delegates to who the citizens vote for. In a couple of places, even if the majority fell with, say, Romney, the state could actually give all the delegates to another candidate, say Huckabee. Kind of a holdover from when they didn't trust the citizens to make intelligent decisions.

And this is only to decide who's going to be that candidate, not even the actual President. That's a whole 'nother level of stuff I don't understand. I'll try to figure it out before voting.

Of course, the whole process of delegates is slightly weird. There's a lot of gerrymandering going on, with large, low population rural states often wielding power on a level with their more populous cousins. Whether this is fair or not is entirely up for debate.

I'll try and write something up after the actual event. Here's hoping it's not a complete cluster-fuck.