Now that Putin has stolen an election and the Venezuelans will keep democracy, TDP can return to more important topics.

The Iowa caucuses are a peculiar institution. Seen globally, primary elections are anomalous enough. Yet Iowa’s delegates to the parties’ nominating conventions are chosen by people walking around a room and revealing their preferences to everyone else. Two features of the Iowa caucuses strikingly mirror the logic of preferential voting systems: iterative preference flows and strategic coordination among rivals.

My old friend at FairVote wrote this overview of how the caucuses work. In a nutshell, candidates must achieve threshold levels of support to win delegates. “Support” or “votes” are the number of people standing in a part of the room that represents a given candidate.

When candidates fail to reach the threshold, deal making and cajoling begins, and things get complicated. In 2004, Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards agreed that if either of them failed to reach threshold in any precinct, their supporters would line up with the other…

In other words, rival candidates bargain for second choice support. When one is eliminated, voters walk across the room, casting “votes” for successive preferences.

Equally interesting is that, depending on the size of the precinct, the threshold to win delegates is about 15-20%. That means the caucuses use a rough form of quota-based proportional representation in which each candidate winning delegates (i.e. “seats”) is analogous to an effective party.