Posted on 02/13/2008 2:12:32 PM PST by COUNTrecount
Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton is looking to Latino voters in Texas to help her wrest the nomination from Barack Obama, but Texas' complicated delegate apportioning system doesn't necessarily favor Hispanic regions of the state.
Of the state's 228 Democratic presidential delegates, 126 will be awarded based on voting in the March 4 primary. But most of the remaining 102 are allocated in a caucus system leading up to the state convention in June, making Texas the only state with a twin primary-caucus system.
Those delegates are allotted by a candidate's performance in each of the state's 31 state senate districts. Each district gets delegates based on Democratic turnout in past elections.
So some urban districts in Houston, Dallas and Austin with higher Democratic turnout in the 2004 and 2006 general elections could give their winning candidate more delegates than some predominantly Hispanic districts in the Rio Grande Valley and El Paso.
For example, a state Senate district in Austin, where 30 percent of residents are Hispanic, will have eight delegates, but a state Senate district in the border city of Brownsville, where the population is 91 percent Hispanic, gets only three.
(Excerpt) Read more at dallasnews.com ...
Hillary gets the Rio Grande Valley and W. Texas.
Don't expect too many Dem votes from the panhandle.
I thought Washington had a similar system, No?
Leave it to the Dems to come up with a system only a policy wonk could love.
Washington State does indeed have a joint caucus-primary system. Makes you wonder about the credibility of this journalist.
Especially after the little scrap Huckabee tried to gin up over the Wash. caucus count. Now that is one complicated system ... either do a caucus or a primary, not both.
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