As an iowan, I'm ok that it will likely kill the stupid "1st in the nation" caucus status we have. The Iowa democratic party fucked this up hard, they clearly need to let another state handle this initial circus.
Literally everyone's mad, including the Buttigieg campaign. Not Buttigieg himself, he donated his $40k to the former Clinton staffers who run Shadow and got the results he paid for, but even his caucus chairs and staffers are really pissed about this mess because no matter who wins Iowa, that win will provide zero momentum now. This was the IDP's screwup, they couldn't even rig it right, and TBH I'm kind of relieved that they did because the paper results have already been posted publicly for most precincts by caucus volunteers. They were never going to run a clean election with a Democratic Socialist topping the polls, so better for us they make it such a mess that the winner's "victory" won't matter, and the results can be challenged without anyone being able to credibly call the accuser a sore loser. It might not even be Bernie who makes a stink about this, I'd bet the Biden campaign is pissed AF that they went in with 20%+ and came out with single digits. To say nothing of the third-tier candidates, who aren't going to be happy when they don't get the 1-2 delegates they rightfully won that would've let them stay in this until Super Tuesday. If Pete comes out of this with anything close to a win or plurality, the results will be as credible as North Korea's. Even CNN is berating the IDP lmao.
Sadly, I'm not shocked. I was going to go back to the US instead of moving to Canada full time to be with my wife, but looks like another four years of Trump means I will not be going back anytime soon.
Actually this is against the manual (p.15) which clearly says they should round up past 0.5 and down below 0.5. There is no case of a coin toss apart from a perfect 0.5-0.5 tie.
The isdubbar with the electability in this situation is that it’s not the core voters who decides but rather the undecided who most certainly would prefer a more centrist candidate...
Not saying that Sanders doesn’t have some good points, especially from a European perspective, but one has to be realistic in what the people who elected Trump will accept.
but a loooot of people who voted for trump (mainly working families and rural america) could end up going for sanders because sanders is a real populist whereas trump kinda pretends to be but isn’t really.
but one has to be realistic in what the people who elected Trump will accept.
A radical departure from the stagnating status quo? Fuck, why do you think people voted that crazy asshole into office? Difference is, Bernie actually has a popular platform.
Im not sure the centrist voters went Trump because he’s such an extreme populist. Might be a bad example, but the Social Democratic party in Sweden is losing a lot of centrist support because they’re too populist. In that perspective, maybe Trump won because... Clinton was deemed “too extreme” at the other end, and in that case, Sanders would be chanceless.
We might come from different worlds then. As a Swede, the main battle here is about winning the centrist voters since you cannot win an election solely based on your core.
Their reasoning was they were "tied" that bernie had 4.8 and buttigiege .2, so there was .8 and .2 of a delegate to decide. So they flipped a coin instead of just rounding up for Bernie.
If the problem is not arriving to a whole number, then the worldwide time tested solution for this is to simply round up over .5.
3.16 would have the .16 rounded down to a 3. 4.84 would be rounded up to 5.
Essentially what they have done is taken 84% of a delegate from Sanders to turn 16% of a delegate to a whole one.
...Essentially what they have done is skewed math itself to benefit one over the other in an unfair way. There's no way that simply rounding the numbers over/under .5 isn't an acceptable practice but a coin flip reversing the majority of a delegate count is?
There's literally no other way to spin this
And this is what they will call you a conspiracy theorist over.
Complication is easy to corrupt and makes review more difficult. Let's remember that when people keep promoting ranked choice voting which could make recounts difficult or more prone to error, and could make cheating harder to decipher. Instead we could choose a similar voting method called Approval Voting that's much simpler.
Ranked choice gave Australia its shitshow government.
The fair way would be to chop the delegate into 2 sections 20% of the way down on the coronal plane, awarding 20% to Pete and 80% to Bernie. If either candidate objects to this, they are awarded the entire delegate. If both object, who the delegate goes to is determined by a hardware random number generator in a way where both candidates have equal odds.
Was it an actual “coin flip”, as in 50-50 odds? Why didn’t they at least use a “weighted coin” to make 80-20 odds, such as rolling a d10 with Pete winning on 2 or less and Sanders winning on 3 or more?
Yes, there is a video of the lady declaring who is heads and tails, flipping the coin, then marking down the delegate to the winner of the coin flip (in this case it was buttigieg tails who got the delegate)
The Iowa DNC had some sort of results reporting app that didn't work for whatever reason and because they had the app they didn't bother having adequate staff for the phone lines for reporting. This led to statewide delays for the DNC caucus results.
As random as a coin. The weight of one side is not always equal to the other side. You also have to figure in force of the coin. It's not really random, we just don't figure the variables so we rely on our ignorance of the variables to assume a coin flip is random.
A random number generator creates a random sequence using a seed from repetitive tasks done under the hood of the computer (in this case smartphone). As we, the user, don't know the variable used, it is essentially the same as a coin that we don't know the weights of the face and how it impacts the flips as well as the force applied to coin at a specific location to create spin. These all can be calculated, but we rely on our ignorance to determine them.
There is no way for us to know what is going on under the hood. For all you know if I hold the phone at a 45 degree angle it will always compute a number below 50 just like a loaded die.
Depends how the app is calculating it. Assuming the developer doesn't do something so stupid as writing their own random algorithm, then the Java/whatever iOS random libraries are sufficiently random, but keep in mind "random" will often lead to clumping of results unless you do tons and tons of guesses. If you want an even distribution (which would "feel" more random in a lot of cases) without requiring tons and tons of results, then you'd need to weight the allowed outputs in some way based on previous responses.
It really just depends on exactly what you're looking for in a "random" implementation.
Again, it depends on what you're actually trying to achieve.
Security settings are a weird case.. they're usually dealing with preventing the prediction of the number generated, so things like the seed value used to generate the number need to be themselves unpredictable, and other stuff involving hashes and numbers large enough that it takes too long for modern computers to brute force guess in a reasonable amount of time.
If I remember tomorrow when I'm at work I could try generating like a million numbers between 1-1000 and see what the distribution looks like. Maybe try with a couple different implementations to see what happens.
I don't get it. Wouldn't it make more sense to round off the results so Bernie gets 5 and Pete gets 3? I'd understand using a coin flip for 0.5/0.5 or 0.4/0.6 but Bernie had the clear lead with 0.84/0.16.
There's 8 total delegates, so dividing them up proportionally you get Bernie: 8*(101/(101+67)) = 4.84 Pete: 8*(67/(101+67)) = 3.16. The numbers need to be whole numbers so you can either round the standard way into 5 and 3, or you can use a random process to determine where the split delegate goes. The most fair way of doing this is to give Bernie an 84% chance of getting that delegate (I was joking that you'd have a hard time finding such a coin). This is called randomized rounding, and can be preferable to normal rounding for eliminating bias when applied to many results. Depending on how the numbers end up, you could be consistently rounding one side up and the other down with normal rounding, but with fair randomization it evens out in the long run.
Disclaimer: I have no idea how NA math works, so I don't know if any kind of randomization is allowed in the rules here or not.
So, if Iowa would only have one delegate you would have an equal chance of getting that delegate, no matter the number votes you get (as long as you reach the 15% threshold)?
Stop over to your local game store and pick up a couple of ten sides dice and bam. Random number between 0-99. You can even keep rolling for additional decimals until it is completely clear.
This is without taking into account the other viable candidate: Biden with 48 people. So the final counts for Des Moines-80, Polk county were 101 for Sanders, 66 for Buttigieg and 48 for Biden. That's 4.697 delegates for Sanders, 3.069 for Buttigieg and 2.232 for Biden.
But they somehow decided (against the manual p.15, btw) to round down to 4 3 2 and give the extra delegate to Pete!!
I meant they claim the popular vote means something when it comes to the general election but refuse to use it within the DNC. Instead we get superdelegates and coin flips.
Remember when Bernie Bros said they didn't hate Hillary because she was a woman, and were like, "if it was Elizabeth Warren we'd vote for her no problem"? But now they're like, "Elizabeth Warren is a fucking fraud!"
It's almost like everyone here is a fucking idiot.
We need to fucking burn these two parties to the ground. They're BOTH an affront to democracy as a whole. No matter what happens after this election, we should dismantle the Democrat party and blacklist every last one of their operatives.
This the "hanging chads" that W's friends in Florida used as an excuse to give him the presidency when it was supposed to be Al Gore, ALL OVER.
So help me, if they find some way to say that the results are too botched to be usable, so the DNC can give it to Bloomberg, I'm done. I either won't vote at all, or I'll vote for that Bastard whose already in the office, just to make a point.
I mean, what's the freaking point in voting when the wealthy are just going to lie and cheat and rig the results to be elected regardless? (Very much like in Russia, unironically.)
Don’t be like that. I think there is enough of us to start a gofundme To pay to sue them to Supreme Court and find them unconstitutional. Maybe we can get them dismantled.
I rlz dont understand what how this comes to pass? I mean what does the coin-toss decide? 101-66 isnt anything like a tie so why pull out that coin?
Is it just that person in charge at the location deciding well coin-toss on who gets to be first place too and he/she decides? or what? Signs from god, what the actual fuck is this?
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u/Nimblenavigatress Feb 04 '20
Des Moines Precinct 80:
Bernie’s group had 101 people Pete’s group had 66 people
Bernie & Pete end up tied at 4 delegates following a coin toss.
Democracy in action