In Texas this morning, they are having the morning-after-caucus roundup to decide which candidate gets to run off into the sunset on the best horse. No, not really, they limit themselves to just the primary and the caucus (which one of the people related to me in Texas reports was fairly chaotic - something about the Clinton people running out of pens).


But this delegate-divvying business strikes me as a tad crazy. I know I said recently that I now embrace the fact that every town in Vermont conducts town meeting slightly differently from every other town, but I've not quite come around to the same feeling about the way we pick delegates who choose the leader of the free world.


In Vermont, if you want to keep track of the delegate count you'd better hope you remember some of that trigonometry because I'm pretty sure cosine is involved.


Ten delegates were directly at stake in yesterday's voting. They're divvied up by percent of vote. If it ends up 60-40 for Obama, he gets 6 delegates and Clinton gets 4. Those 10 choose five more, the presumption being they would end up 3 for Obama, 2 for Clinton (total now=9 for Obama and 6 for Clinton). Those 5 choose 1 more, who presumably would be for Obama (10-6).

Add in the state's seven super-delegates, five of whom have pledged to Obama, 1 to Clinton and Howard Dean staying neutral and you have 15-7.

Carry the one and multiple by the participle minus the barometric pressure plus Howard Dean's blood pressure and you have your final results.

Can someone explain to me what committee came up with this and why this system is better than a more direct vote-delegate link?

- Terri Hallenbeck