If you liked the Florida recount you'll love the Iowa caucuses.
By William Saletan and Matt Schiller
Posted Friday, Jan. 16, 2004, at 3:28 PM PT
Three years ago, the United States was preparing to inaugurate a president who had lost the popular vote. Through a complex delegate-selection process, George W. Bush had parlayed his defeat in the national ballot count into a razor-thin victory in the Electoral College. Even Bush's edge in the delegate tally was in doubt, since a photo finish in the pivotal jurisdiction, Florida, required an official recount that was never systematically conducted or completed.
There's a very good chance it's about to happen all over again.
This time, the vote isn't national or final, but it will go a long way toward determining the alternative to Bush in November 2004. The vote will take place in Iowa Monday night. More than 100,000 Democrats will go to precinct caucuses to select a nominee for president. Which candidate will get the most votes that night? If the race remains close, you'll never know.
If you like the Electoral College, you'll love the Iowa Democratic caucuses. Here's how they work. You meet in a room with all the other registered Democrats in your precinct who decide to show up. It can take hours. First you have to choose local party officers and sit through a lot of talk about party activities. Then the caucus chair asks everybody to express their preferences among the presidential candidates. She tells the Howard Dean people to stand in this corner, the Dick Gephardt people in that corner, the John Kerry people in the other corner, etc. There's also a corner for "uncommitted." You go to your corner. The chair counts how many people are in each group. That's the raw vote.
If you're in the Gephardt corner, you can probably stay there. But if you're in the Dennis Kucinich corner, look out. The party has a "viability" rule: If your group doesn't add up to a sufficient percentage of the total vote in the room—at least 15 percent, but it can go higher, depending on various factors—the chair will declare your group nonviable. Now you have to choose which of the viable candidates you prefer as a second choice. You go stand in that corner. Other Kucinich supporters (and Wes Clark supporters, and supporters of any other nonviable candidate) go to other corners, depending on whom they prefer. The chair counts again. That's the realigned vote.
Next the chair translates this vote count into a delegate count. Every viable group gets at least one delegate. The bigger your group, the more delegates you can earn. But there are two catches. First, the number of delegates to be distributed in the room depends on how many Democrats voted in your precinct in the most recent gubernatorial and presidential elections. If you're new in town, and the turnout in your precinct was lousy four years ago, your vote effectively counts less than it would have if you'd moved to a high-turnout precinct. Second, if your group is bigger than another group in the room, that doesn't guarantee you'll get more delegates. Let's say the chair has six delegates to distribute, and there are four viable groups. That leaves two extra delegates, which will probably go to the two biggest groups. If you're in the third-biggest group, and you've got more people than the fourth group does, tough luck. You each get a delegate, and that's that.
The precinct chair phones the county Democratic Party and reports how many county delegates have been awarded to each candidate or to "uncommitted" in your precinct. The chair also calculates how many state delegates (the über-delegates who will be chosen by the county delegates) each candidate would probably get based on his number of county delegates. That's the delegate count.
On caucus night, the Iowa Democratic Party will release the delegate count. Here's when the party will release the raw vote count and the realigned vote count: Never. The party won't compile or even record them, except as a temporary step in most precincts so that the caucus chair can determine how many delegates each candidate gets. The party doesn't want raw votes compiled and released, because it wants the caucuses to be a collaborative activity, not a tally of individual preferences. That's all well and good, if you like the party's communitarian version of democracy. But if you want to know how many voters stood up for John Edwards, you're out of luck.
This wasn't a problem four years ago, because Al Gore thumped Bill Bradley in the Iowa delegate count by a 2-1 margin. It was a two-man race, and Gore had clearly won. In 1996, Bill Clinton faced no real opposition. In 1992, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, was such a prohibitive favorite that other Democrats skipped the caucuses. To create a dangerously high risk that the winner of the delegate count isn't the winner of the raw vote, you need two things: a big field, so that there will be plenty of nonviable groups to redistribute at the precinct caucuses, and a close race.
You have to go all the way back to 1988 to find an Iowa Democratic presidential contest in which both of those factors applied. What happened that year? Gephardt beat Sen. Paul Simon, D-Ill., by four percentage points in the state delegate count. Did Gephardt win the raw vote? A media consortium called the News Election Service said he did, by three percentage points. But four months later, an article revealed that the NES had reported vote counts from only 70 percent of the caucuses and had botched so many of those that its numbers couldn't be trusted. A separate caucus-night projection by NBC News, aborted and never disclosed on air, had Gephardt leading by only half a percentage point. Given the closeness of the race, there was no way to know whether, when Iowans stood up to be counted, Gephardt got the most votes.
This year, the two risk factors have returned with a vengeance. The field is bigger than in 1988, and the race is closer. The latest Iowa polls have the top four candidates—Dean, Gephardt, Kerry, and Edwards—within the margin of error. The NES, which tried to count the raw vote in 1988, is gone. Here's the system the media have created to replace the NES: Nothing. Plenty of reporters will attend caucuses, but nobody is systematically reporting the raw vote, or even the realigned vote. Some folks at the TV networks seem to think the Associated Press is reporting the raw vote. That's news to the AP.
If the "winner" anointed by the media is determined by the delegate count rather than the raw count, who's likely to get screwed? Do the math. Edwards is hovering just above 15 percent in most statewide surveys. That means that in a lot of precincts, his supporters are likely to fall just below the viability threshold and be disbanded, earning zero delegates. Dean could be shortchanged by the turnout-based allotment of delegates to each precinct. If, as advertised, Dean brings in people who had previously given up on voting, the low turnout caused by their absence from the last election in that precinct will diminish the number of delegates they can earn in this election, no matter how many of them show up.
The TV networks will have one way to estimate the raw vote: entrance polls. As Democrats enter the caucuses, Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International will ask them, among other things, whom they plan to vote for. An official at one network said her organization would use the entrance polls to help project the winner. That's exactly what the entrance polls shouldn't be used for, according to Warren Mitofsky, one of the executives who's supervising them. But absent a raw vote count, it would be surprising if network analysts responsible for projecting the winner didn't look at the entrance polls, if only to see whether they matched the delegate count.
Why are the people who conduct the entrance polls nervous about using them to project winners? Look at what happened in Florida in 2000. Networks initially called the state for Gore based largely on exit polls. As the returns came in, the networks realized that the exit polls were off. Then came more returns, and a half-baked official recount, and a court fight, and a contested inauguration, and finally a too-late unofficial media recount that showed Bush winning under some rules and Gore winning under others. Everyone could argue about which ballots should count. But at least there were ballots to look at.
In Iowa, there will be no ballots.
sidebar
Return to article
The Phantom Poll Booth
Who won the 1988 Iowa Democratic caucuses? We'll never know.
By William Saletan
This article was originally published in the June 1988 issue of American Politics.
At 9:13 P.M. on February 8, CBS News announced that Richard Gephardt had won the Iowa Democratic caucuses. Before the night was over, Gephardt had visited all three network sets, brimming with confidence over his comeback victory in the formative Democratic contest of 1988. Runner-up Paul Simon struggled to spin the outcome his way, but was told point-blank in two morning interviews that he had fallen short of expectations. Gephardt promptly jumped up 10 percent in New Hampshire polls, passing Simon for good. A week later, Simon finished behind Gephardt again and was effectively written out of the race.
But wait a minute. Did Paul Simon really lose in Iowa? The networks said he did, based on a mix of entrance polls, samples of key precincts and a county-by-county tally of votes compiled by a cooperative effort called the News Election Service. But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House. And maybe Paul Simon wasn't really the loser he was reported to be.
While ABC and CBS projected Gephardt the winner by three percentage points, NBC aborted—and didn't report until 24 hours later—its own projection showing Gephardt leading by only half a point. Why didn't NBC go public on caucus night with its projection? Because, in the words of NBC director of elections and polling Mary Klette, "you'd be absolutely crazy" to predict a winner with only a half-point margin in the key precinct sample. ABC director of political operations Stan Opotowsky agrees. "The point of key precincts is to tell you who won. A half a point doesn't mean a thing." In other words, if NBC's squelched figures were right, the race was simply too close to call.
To the network political pros, worrying about key precincts in retrospect is a pointless exercise. After all, the News Election Service's count of actual votes showed Gephardt winning by three points. "The official vote is that county vote as it comes in from N.E.S.," explains Klette. "Once that adds up to 100 percent, that's what decides who wins and who loses." Opotowsky concurs.
But questioning the precinct tallies isn't pointless, for three reasons. One, the N.E.S. count was never completed; it stopped with only 70 percent of precincts reporting. Two, it wasn't official. And three, a comedy of errors—attributable in part to the N.E.S., in part to its reporters and in part to the Iowa Democratic Party—rendered the N.E.S. count absolutely worthless as a final authority on the caucus outcome. Who won the Iowa Democratic caucuses? The truth is, nobody knows.
The Iowa Democratic Party thinks it knows who won. On caucus night, the party tabulated and reported the share of county delegates won by each candidate using a system of numerical thresholds and weights that makes a space-based laser missile defense system look like a junior high science fair project. According to the party's count, Gephardt won 31.24 percent of the weighted delegates to Simon's 26.68 percent—a margin of 4.56 points.
That's the sausage; here's how it's made. Say 100 people show up at precinct caucus X. The caucus chair designates eight stations around the room, one for each candidate and one for undecided. Twenty-eight people go to Simon, 27 to Gephardt, 18 to Dukakis, 9 to Jackson, 8 to Babbitt, 1 to Hart and 9 to Uncommitted. Now, caucus rules say you need 15 percent of the total to elect a precinct delegate. So the caucus chair announces that Jackson, Babbitt, Hart, Gore and Uncommitted aren't "viable." Members of those groups can then band together or defect to their second-choice groups. Say six Jackson people move to Gephardt, two to Simon, one to Uncommitted. The Babbitt group moves over to Uncommitted to elect one of its own as an "uncommitted" delegate who can vote for Babbitt at the county level; the Hart oddball defects to Gephardt; two uncommitted people defect to Gephardt, another to Dukakis. Now the chair counts again: Gephardt has 36; Simon, 30; Dukakis, 19; Uncommitted, 15. Of the seven delegates precinct X will send to the county convention, each group wins one delegate just for meeting the 15 percent threshold. Gephardt is awarded two of the remaining delegates; Simon gets one. So the chair phones in the results to county headquarters: Gephardt, three delegates; Simon, two; Dukakis, one; Uncommitted, one.
After all 20 precincts in the county have reported, the county chair phones in the total county delegates to state Democratic headquarters: Gephardt, 51; Simon, 41; Dukakis, 33; Jackson, 7; Uncommitted, 5; Babbitt, 3. Now, due to high Democratic turnout in this county in the last two election years, the Iowa Democratic Party "weights" these delegates to give the county more clout in the caucus process than another county, where Simon has won 30 percent of the delegates to Gephardt's 29 percent. In our hypothetical scenario, when the "weighted" delegates across the state are added up, Gephardt ends up with just over 31 percent, Simon just under 27 percent. That's the official result of the Iowa Democratic caucuses.
The network brass who deal with this process point out that it's incomprehensible, slow and seriously impure as an exercise in democracy. They spawned the N.E.S. in 1983 to eliminate these problems and to tell them who "really" won the caucuses. The N.E.S. was supposed to count how many Democrats went to the caucuses to pick each candidate as their first choice for the nomination—a simple straw vote. Above all, the N.E.S. was supposed to report those results quickly, so the networks could announce the winners during prime time on caucus night.
With nearly 2,500 precincts to cover, N.E.S. president Bob Flaherty sought the cooperation of the Iowa Democrats, the one organization that would have a representative—namely, the caucus chair—at each caucus anyway and, of course, the very organization whose electoral policies the N.E.S. would undermine. At a January 1987 meeting, Flaherty asked top party officials to make a straw vote part of the official process. The Democrats refused to sanction the N.E.S. count or to cooperate with the N.E.S. in reporting the initial head count. From the party's point of view, the N.E.S. was sloppy and had no business revising the caucus system for the sake of expediency. From the N.E.S.'s standpoint, the party was obstructing all attempts to render the caucuses fair and intelligible.
"Some of our people were excused from the caucuses because they were under 18 or because they weren't Democrats, which is not normally a test that one gives to reporters," says Flaherty. It would also be a breach of the state's open-meeting law. But Flaherty refuses to cite any incidents in which N.E.S. reporters were kicked out, and he declines to discuss specific complaints until more "research" is done.
In caucus training sessions across the state in January and in a letter just before the caucuses, the state party instructed precinct leaders to bar N.E.S. reporters from leaving to make phone calls to the N.E.S. (for fear their absence would affect viability counts) and from checking the registry of caucus-goers' initial preferences. But on caucus night, some counties allowed the N.E.S. reporters to caucus and collect the pre-viability count; many others didn't. Marty Ryan is the Democratic co-chair in Crawford County; his wife was hired by the N.E.S. as a reporter. When the N.E.S. sent her instructions to report the initial head count, Marty Ryan recalls, "I crossed out that part and sent it out to all the N.E.S. reporters in the county and said, Do not report these results." Only four precincts in the county defied him. Elsewhere, N.E.S. reporters showed up late, missed the initial counts and asked to peek at the registries; caucus chairs blew them off.
Aside from the party's attitude, four systematic problems rendered the N.E.S. figures useless.
2. Early second choices. "Right away, when they saw they didn't have, enough for viability, people started moving," says one N.E.S. reporter. "It was really hard to count them before they switched." Interviews indicate that this happened at about one of every three caucuses—generally the smaller ones. Here, the first preferences of many voters disappeared before N.E.S. reporters could record them—and an equivalent number of second choices contaminated what was supposed to be a pre-viability count.
3. Chaos. "There were so many people in the room," explains one exasperated Des Moines caucus-goer, "you couldn't tell where one group stopped and the other group began." One western Iowa county leader says that at most caucuses he's seen, "Unless you're standing five feet above everybody, you can't see the actual movement." This was the case in a third of the caucuses—generally the larger ones.
4. Incomplete counting. "If there's 100 people in a caucus, and there's 50 people over there, you know that's a viable group," says Crawford County's Ryan. "They're not even gonna count that until final alignment." This happened in about a fourth of the caucuses.
5. Procedural quirks. One caucus erupted into a fistfight; another caucus consisted of 132 participants who decided to count themselves as only 129; another voted to start all over after some Hart people complained they had been betrayed by one of their own. One N.E.S. reporter was told she couldn't obtain any figures from her caucus because the results could appear on television sets at living-room caucuses and prejudice their results.
N.E.S. corner-cutting only made matters worse. Many of the people hired as reporters were minors recruited by high school government teachers and youth group directors. Most of the kids were told they could get the raw vote from the caucus registry—precisely what the Democrats had already ruled out. Some kids tried to read the registries upside down. Some freaked out and left.
Union County youth-group director Les Sallee says the N.E.S. asked him to find kids to cover the county's 17 precincts as part of a "citizenship development" program. Were the kids up to the task? "More or less," he ventures. Apparently, less. "Some of these kids came to me and wanted to know what they were supposed to do," says Lee Campbell, a local teacher. The N.E.S. reporters he saw ranged from 15 to 17 years old. (Interestingly, 15 to 17 was also the ratio of Union County caucuses reported to caucuses held.) "I'm not sure that the young people that they had out there were getting the information that they were supposed to," says Campbell. Another 4-H director asked each of her kids to cover two caucuses at once, gambling that the initial counts wouldn't be taken simultaneously; they missed two precincts. (A 4-H officer in a third county missed six.) A sorority president in Osceola tried the same stunt. She missed two of three initial counts and ended up reporting only 3 of 10 precincts to the N.E.S.
Songwriter Dan Hunter relates his conversation with a high school student reporting for the N.E.S. in Des Moines.
Hunter: What are you doing?
N.E.S. rep: I don't know.
Hunter: Why do you have a Simon sticker on?
N.E.S. rep: I'm with his group.
Hunter: The hell you are. You can't caucus with them if you're an N.E.S. counter.
N.E.S. rep: What am I supposed to do?
Hunter: Well, you dumb shit, didn't they tell you what to do?
N.E.S. rep: Well, I was just supposed to count things, right?
Hunter: What are you getting paid for this?
N.E.S. rep: I don't know.
Hunter: Why are you here?
N.E.S. rep: I'm raising money for my wrestling team.
Out of sheer pity, Hunter gave him the count—"The final count, the delegate count. If I had had an axe to grind, I could have told him anything."
Not that the adult N.E.S. reporters couldn't have used some training, too. "It was a very sloppy business," one says. "I did not know how to do it. I thought that the secretary was keeping track of those numbers at the very beginning, and she did have some figures down. But when I went to pick them up, some of those people had moved. I know it wasn't exact. So I had to just kind of guess. There were some real large groups, and I couldn't be absolutely sure of the numbers." This reporter ended up using the caucus registry, which she and several others hadn't signed, to report the raw vote.
"We were just sort of dumped out there," says another. "The News Election Service had not asked for any training, as far as I know, and I didn't see that any would be needed." So how did it go? She laughs: "Actually, I ended up not calling in the initial results, because we forgot about it." This reporter was a caucus chair. She and her friends, none of whom were trained, had been selected by the N.E.S. as a particularly able group deserving first choice among the precincts in her county. "I thought we had problems," she recalls. "Then I heard about some of the other precincts and I thought, Well, we're not too bad off."
A third N.E.S. reporter, confused by what one of her reporters told her after the caucuses, recalls: "He said the figures were all messed up that were reported to the News Election Service."
All N.E.S. reporters were given badges and were instructed to identify themselves to the caucus chair when they arrived, so they should have been noticed wherever they were. But county and caucus chairs say the N.E.S. simply missed some precincts—in Davenport, in Council Bluffs, in South Iowa and, according to state Democratic officials, in other places across the state. Several N.E.S. county officers admit that some of their people just never called in the results, and perhaps didn't even show up.
Aside from the chaotic fieldwork, N.E.S. headquarters managed some bumbling of its own. One western county chair says he and his wife, an N.E.S. reporter, tabulated identical counts of the initial preferences in his precincts and relayed them to the N.E.S. But although the figures the N.E.S. passed on to the networks were based on reports from only 9 of 20 precincts, they showed more people present than voted in all 20 precincts. The county chair says he investigated until he located the N.E.S.'s mistake, but that the N.E.S. has refused to cooperate. He and other county chairs suspect that the local figures published by the N.E.S. were "totally fictitious."
Ironically, network political chiefs don't even seriously consider the possibility that the N.E.S. screwed up the count. "Where do you think N.E.S. got it?" asks ABC's Opotowsky. "From the party. The N.E.S. reporter's job is to phone them in. He doesn't count anything. The party officially tells him what the count is." And what if the reporter gets confused? Opotowsky sighs. "One thing you have to understand," he explains gently, "the N.E.S. reporter's not somebody who just wandered in out of the cold. This is probably his tenth Iowa caucus, in each case."
The contrast with reality could not be any more stark. If the networks thought they were getting some kind of official count of the caucuses, they were ripped off. And the viewers who watched Brokaw, Rather and Jennings rattle off N.E.S. numbers all night on February 8 were ripped off. It's possible that Paul Simon was ripped off too. Skeptics, including some Simon aides, say Gephardt's four-point lead in the final delegate count shows he probably had more raw votes. But the hypothetical scenario sketched out above shows how a Simon win in the raw vote could turn into a four-point Simon loss in the delegate count. Crawford County chair Ryan thinks that's implausible. Yet, in one of his precincts, Simon had three-fourths of the caucus-goers but was awarded only one of two delegates. And in the translation of final head counts into Crawford County delegates—a single step in the complex chain of equations—Simon dropped from 26 percent to 23 percent, while Gephardt rose from 46 percent to 47 percent. Little by little, these things add up.
Maybe Paul Simon did lose the Iowa straw vote after all. But at the very least, that devastating verdict, if it was to be reported at all, should have been based on more than a probability curve.
In the last days before the caucuses, buoyed by the Des Moines Register's endorsement, Simon aides echoed the Babbitt campaign's mocking line on Gary Hart: "Let the media decide." On February 8, that's what happened.
William Saletan is Slate's chief political correspondent.
Matt Schiller is a Slate intern.
Article URL: slate.msn.com |
