Sharpton wins a Delegate

Last night, I criticized CNN for awarding Sharpton a pledged DE delegate. While they deserve criticism for much of their coverage, in that case they were right and I was wrong. I was basing my information on The Green Papers which said that all of Delaware's 15 delegates were chosen based on the statewide vote. That is incorrect. Fortunately they link to a .pdf file of the actual selection plan. It turns out the City of Wilmington gets to choose 2 delegates.

The state of Delaware has election results by (state rep.) district. From what I can tell the city of Wilmington covers exactly the first four state districts. What follows is based on that info. Adding up the totals we see that there were 4616 votes cast in Wilmington. So a candidate needed 693 votes to meet the 15% threshold there. Two candidates did that. Sharpton with 709 and Kerry with 2097. Thus there were 2806 qualifying votes. Kerry wins the first delegate (1403 votes) with 694 remaining votes. So Sharpton wins the other delegate! If Sharpton had won a mere 10 less votes in Wilmington there would have been a tie for that delegate. With 11 less votes, Kerry wins the delegate outright.

Of course, Sharpton knew how Delaware selects its delegates which explains why he visited Wilmington a number of times. His trips paid off.