Talk:Results of the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries/Archive 4

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Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3 Archive 4 Archive 5 Archive 6 → Archive 10

Adding missing events

To the best of my knowledge, the following states have a multiple-event process for selecting delegates:

Since I'm most familiar with Washington's events (because I live there), I've added (and maintain) all the events for that state. But the rest of these states don't have all of their respective events listed. I've got my hands full editing the various articles related to Washington's voting processes, so I don't have time to delve into the details of each other state's particular process. Would anyone like to volunteer to add all the appropriate events for one or more of the above states? --Bryan H Bell (talk) 23:11, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

For some states, Alaska for example, the state convention isn't as much an event in which we can report results as it a formality in allocating delegates. – Zntrip 00:40, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
That may be true for some states, but I'm not so sure it is for Alaska. I'm no expert on Alaska's delegate selection process, but according to the Green Pages page linked above, it looks like they choose about 400 delegates to the state convention during the precinct/house distric caucues on February 5 and then on May 24 these 400 delegates choose the 18 delegates to the national convention. Couldn't the percentage allocation per candidate change slightly at this second event? --Bryan H Bell (talk) 01:53, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
I'm not too sure. Try looking at the 2004 caucuses. – Zntrip 03:38, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Democrats abroad question

In the first map, "Democrats abroad" are coloured blue. How can that be, if the results are expected to be announced at the end of February? Gugganij (talk) 00:11, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

The results were announced on the 21st.[1] ~ PaulT+/C 20:36, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

The delegate results are wrong. Apparently this primary awards its delegates in a special way.

From The Globe and Mail:

The party will send 14 pledged delegates to the convention, each with a half vote. The primary was used to determine nine people, or the equivalent of 4.5 delegates. Mr. Obama won 2.5 and Ms. Clinton won two, according to Ms. Schon Marques.

The Democrats Abroad will hold a global convention in Vancouver, Canada, in April to select the other five people who will attend the convention. They will represent the remaining 2.5 votes.

So someone please update the charts with these results. --Jedravent (talk) 21:42, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I've updated the article to show the three events in the Democrats Abroad delegate selection process and the number of delegates (actually delegate votes, to match the rest of the states' events) chosen at each. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 00:21, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Wait, why are some sources [2] reporting that they have 22, with half a vote each? -Aknorals (talk) 00:43, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Er, wait, apparently that was counting super. NM -Aknorals (talk) 00:44, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Nationwide popular vote

It was suggested in passing above, but I think we should a column for the nationwide popular vote.

The vote itself technically has no effect on the nomination - that's solely based on delegates, but because it is now highly unlikely that anyone can win the democratic nom without superdelegates (absent a concession), the nationwide popular vote may prove important. Superdelegates will be coming under pressure to support whichever candidate has the most pledged delegates, but if the other candidate can point to a close nationwide popular vote, they may be able to argue for superdelegates' votes etc.

Given this, and the general closeness of the race, I think a spot on the result table for the nationwide popular votes adds something useful.

Thoughts? Quadparty (talk) 07:24, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

You mean like Results of the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries#Popular vote? I added this to the page last night, but I don't see an easy way to add this information to the results table. ~ PaulT+/C 14:56, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
Exactly! I was looking for it in the top table and couldn't see it, but I think you're right that it would be difficult fit that info into the main table. Quadparty (talk) 19:44, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
Since encyclopedic content must be verifiable shouldn't there be some explanation of how the popular vote numbers are generated? I am guessing that states with primaries use constituents votes and caucus states use the total number of caucus participants when official numbers were provided. I don't know if or how caucus states that did not provide official totals were included in the total. I am new to Wikipedia (first post) so please excuse this comment if it's just a matter of newbie ignorance.Vanoden (talk) 15:20, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Basically the numbers need to parallel a reliable source. That said, there actually is quite a bit of different scenerios possible depending upon how you decide to count it, Sabetiso[sp?] Crystal Ball pre WI-HI in one of his recent articles listed quite a different number of possible ways to count the popular vote. The most favorable to Clinton being Obama leads by 100K (only count primaries, excluding all the cacus states but include MI/FL). The most favorable to Obama being Obama leads by 800K (count all cacuses including his extrapolations of the state popular vote in states where the Democrats only released preceint-delegate equivalent counts + total number of attendees and exclude MI/FL.) Jon (talk) 14:21, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Democrats Abroad delegates

Looking at the official results, I'm inclined to think that the split will be 4-3 to Obama, rather than 4.5-2.5. The breakdown is as follows:

Asia-Pacific 1-1
Americas 1-1
Europe-Middle East-Africa 3-2 to Obama
At large (3) 2-1 to Obama
PLEOs (2) 1-1

TOTAL 8-6 → 4-3 to Obama --Ross UK (talk) 22:59, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Unless I'm looking at the wrong document, I can't see any indication of a delegate breakdown on the official results. This is why I chose to use a different source (the Green Papers site) for the estimated national delegates column. Where did you obtain the breakdown above? --Bryan H Bell (talk) 00:37, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
According to Democrats abroad webpage;
"These results determine the allocation of 4.5 delegate votes at the Democratic National Convention. Senator Obama won 2.5 delegate votes, and Senator Clinton 2 delegate votes. A further 2.5 votes will be determined at the Democrats Abroad Global Convention in April. In addition, Democrats Abroad holds 4 superdelegate votes. A total of 22 delegates, each with a half vote, will attend the Convention."lil2mas (talk) 00:46, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks lil2mas. I also notice the following from the same source:
"Under the Democrats Abroad Delegate Selection Plan, the results of the worldwide primary are to be applied to the Regional Caucuses once the allocation of delegates to each Caucus is made. Rounding to determine the allocation among the Regions results in 2 delegates to be elected by each of the Americas and Asia-Pacific Regional Caucuses, and 5 delegates to be elected by the Europe, Middle East and Africa Regional Caucus, resulting in one delegate each for Obama and Clinton in the Americas and in Asia-Pacific, and three delegates for Obama and 2 for Clinton in EMEA."
This seems to indicate that the Regional Caucuses have no effect whatsoever on delegate count. I've therefore removed that event from this article. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 02:57, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
From the Green Papers we find that the nine delegates selected at the Regional Caucuses are each elected to the National Convention, with half a vote each, thus we have 2.5-2 for Obama. Those nine then attend the Global Caucus and vote to elect the remaining 3 at large and 2 PLEO delegates. I had omitted to notice however that the superdelegates also vote at that Convention, so we cannot estimate the outcome on the same basis as the other states (eg. Iowa). Thus the total should at the moment read 2.5-2. --Ross UK (talk) 06:10, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

New SVG Map

The remaining county in Wisconsin, Clark, needs to be blue for Obama. He got 2,613 votes to her 2,233 votes in Clark Source. HoosierStateTalk 01:44, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

What happened to Tennessee?

I was just checking over the results section, and it seems that the section on Tennessee is missing. I believe they held their primary on Super Tuesday, so this is important. I don't have time to hunt for it now, but I wanted to let the main editors of this page know. Academic Challenger (talk) 05:46, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

It was lost with an edit made on Monday to change the state delegation order from alphabetical to chronological (see #State Delegation Order above). I notice that Paul has already restored the Tennesee data. Thanks, Academic Challenger, for the catch! --Bryan H Bell (talk) 08:59, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Accessiblity

I hesitate to bring this up when there's still so much content-related work to be done here, but what can we do to improve this article's accessibility? The issue first occurred to me the other day when we fiddled a bit with the table colors. I have just recently tried to improve accessibility a bit by italicizing the 2nd place data in the tables so that color isn't the only way this information is conveyed. I must admit I'm at a bit of a loss for how to more accessibly convey that candidates have withdrawn. And speaking of withdrawn candidates, that pink color we use throughout the article really pops off the page, highlighting information that I think we really mean to de-emphasize. We might do well to try employing some of Wikipedia's color guidelines, not only for appearances, but also for accessibility. Ideas anyone? --Bryan H Bell (talk) 10:07, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

I notice an editor made all the 1st place data both bold and italics. Is this the best way to do it? I was thinking bold only for 1st place and italics only for 2nd. I wasn't sure what to do about 3rd place, though. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 19:28, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Pennsylvania: Primary on 22 April 2008, not 11 April 2008

This is a small edit, but it's a lot bigger than the edits I usually make: Pennsylvania's primary disappeared in this edit. It came back in this edit, but with the wrong date. I've fixed the date. --Incremental Improvements (talk) 15:46, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Whoa, that was my edit! My apologies. I'm not absolutely sure how that happened, but I seem to recall getting an edit conflict when I made that change. I think I copied the text of the rows with my changes, clicked on 'edit this page' to start over, and pasted that text back in. That practice (not the best way to handle the edit conflict!) may have introduced the error. Strangely, the diff between my edit and the previous edit (which I had used to check my work) doesn't show the Pennsylvania row being removed, but the revised page below the diff does show a cite error so I should have caught that. Ah well, I'll be more careful with this in the future. Again, apologies. Thanks to both Paul and and Incremental Improvements for fixing my error. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 19:09, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Removing "Delegation results" section

The "Delegation results" section is redundant of each individual primary results article. Without the section the article is 43 KB, but currently with the section the article exceeds 139 KB- it takes a really long time to load for my computer. I have been bold and removed the section. -- Wikipedical (talk) 20:39, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Methinks you are a bit too bold (especially when you removed it the first time without any discussion at all). The material you removed is not entirely duplicated in the individual primary results articles. If we were to decide to remove the "Delegation results" section, we should probably make sure to move the approrpiate data to the individual articles first. I've reverted your edit again. Let's discuss whether or not to remove the section before we delete it again. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 20:50, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Considering that the idea of this page is to display the results, I'll have to say that I am completely opposed to the removal of the "Delegation results" section. – Zntrip 21:24, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
I agree. I'm searching for tricks to reduce the page heaviness. --Subver (talk) 21:39, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Though I thought Wikipedical's edits were somewhat reckless, I'm not certain they're ultimately wrong, or they at least point to an issue we should address. There does seem to be a fair amount of duplication in the material on Wikipedia regarding the 2008 presidential primary numbers. I'm not sure how best to deal with this problem. In some cases, it makes sense to have information duplicated when it is either summarizing more detailed information elsewhere or displaying the same information from a different perspective. It is true that the results tables in this article are often substantively the same as the ones in the individual state primary articles. A few ways to deal with this might include:
1. remove the "Delegation results" section from this article
2. delete the individual state primary articles
3. substitute the results tables in the individual state primary articles with links to this article
4. substitute the results tables in this article with links to the individual state primary articles
5. keep the results tables in both this article and the individual state primary articles
I think I like option 3 best. I think it would be a good idea to limit the scope of the individual state primary articles to explaining their delegate selection process and providing any narative history for the process. Those articles might include the high-level final results ("Obama won the precinct caucuses with 64% of the delegates") but would otherwise direct users to this article for the details. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 22:02, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
From those that you've provided, a combination of options 1 and 4 would be most efficient. If the individual primary articles were to exist, there is no reason why in addition to their narrative histories results should not be present. Since these articles inherently need to list the results, the focus of a primary, this article is the redundant one. This page should link to these individual pages in the way that a List of Episodes page on Wikipedia links to individual episode articles for television program articles. It would reduce the size of this 100+ KB article to a reasonable size. Your primary objection to my edits was that the information should be copied to the individual pages first. I would take part in moving this information if others would offer some assistance, and then we can remove the sizable redundancy from this page. After deleting the section, we can offer links to the individual pages through the "Overview of results" section, as my original edits did. Thanks. -- Wikipedical (talk) 01:10, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
A good argument. One concern I have with your suggestion is that currently it's pretty easy for a user to see "just the numbers" all in one article. If we move the tables into their respective state articles, users may find themselves having to hunt through the text of various articles to find more detailed numbers. If we managed somehow to standardize the layout of the various state articles, maybe that would ameliorate the issue.
I appreciate your offer to help move the information to its relevant articles. Should we decide to do so, I too will help with this task. And in that case, I wonder if renaming this article to something like Results summary of the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries would be in order. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 03:09, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
I would like to propose two more options, if I may:
6. Only display the votes of the candidates who are running nationwide campaigns (Obama, Clinton, Edwards, Gravel, Kucinich, Richardson, Biden & Dodd) in the main article. Links to the full listing in the state's own primary article. (May not reduce the main page significantly enough, though?!)
7. Only display the candidates still in the race at the time of the respective election. With links for full listings, as above.
8. Make a template for each state which could be used in both the main article, aswell as in the state's own primary article. This has been used in the UEFA Euro 2008 qualifying, aswell as numerous other competitions. Template:UEFA Euro 2008 qualifying
The easiest, and maybe the best, would be to just go with option 8. Though for optimal minimizing of size, a combination of option 6/7 and 8, would be the best, but this requires more time and good template skills. Opinions please? lil2mas (talk) 02:30, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

I reduced to 100K the size, using some tricks (thank you regular expressions!), without changing the output. --Subver (talk) 02:46, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Option 9: transclusion. Take a look at what I did for the Alabama primary section. I was able to transclude the template from the individual page without using a template. This is the best option and takes up the least space. It also allows editors to update both pages at the same time. The only problem is we would have to standardize all the templates on the individual pages, but we can/should do that anyway. -- Wikipedical (talk) 02:54, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Please stop doing things without an agreement. I think it's a good solution, but I propose to move these tables to the single states (overwriting them). Because of better graphics. However the HTML heaviness is the same to the browser. --Subver (talk) 03:33, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
But there's a big problem. The notes. --Subver (talk) 03:42, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
I agree with Subver. Let's please discuss this before making further changes. A little patience, please, Wikipedical! --Bryan H Bell (talk) 03:53, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
By the way, Subver. What's the big problem with the notes that you see? --Bryan H Bell (talk) 08:45, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Now tables have notes. Using transclusion it's impossible to keep them. Moreover single state pages have their notes.They should be removed, I don't know. --Subver (talk) 08:52, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
I figured out a way around that: include the full notes (not just the ref names) within the transcluded tables. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 08:32, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
That's pretty cool. Transclusion in Wikipedia is a new one for me. Here's another issue to consider: the editors of this page have been working toward an event-based list of results, rather than simply summarizing all the events for a state in a single table (or row). As an example, see the Washington State events. So far, some of the individual state articles treat various events in separate articles while others treat it as if the separate events were all one big event. I don't think we really want separate articles for each event. Shouldn't we rename/merge the various individual state articles to cover all nominating events in each state before we start moving (or transcluding) tables out of this article? I notice in your test that you've already elimninated the global convention event when you moved the tables from this article to Democrats Abroad primary, 2008 --Bryan H Bell (talk) 03:47, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
I still think this page does a good job of coordinating all the results. The separate pages as they exist now would not sufficiently explain states’ events (for those that have multiple ones). Also, I am completely opposed to abridging results to candidates who haven’t dropped out or have national campaigns, as it is unencyclopedic to censor information simple for brevity. Furthermore, why would it matter if the page is too long? Its purpose is to display the complete results all together and that can’t be done anywhere else. I’m going with option five for now. – Zntrip 04:02, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
The problems associated with large pages are listed in depth at Wikipedia:Article size. We are having editor issues right now, there are clearly reader issues associated with this giant page, and many readers (including myself) have browser issues because it takes so long to load. The size of the article isn't the only problem, it's the fact that there are two competing systems for databasing this information: individual primary pages and this complete results page. We need to figure out a way to better organize this information that won't be redundant and can cut down the size of this page if possible. -- Wikipedical (talk) 04:33, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedical is right about the page being slow to load. I experience this myself, though I also encounter some featured articles that take as long to load. Regardless, I agree that we should work toward consolidating the duplication of information between this article and others, even if we only do so using transclusion techniques. One question regarding transclusion: if the transcluding links have to reach out to all the individual state result articles to bring their data in, wouldn't that also contribute to a slow-loading article? In other words, wouldn't we just be trading one performance inhibitor (lots of article text) for another (lots of transclusion fetches)?
Overall, I must admit I'm inclining more and more toward option 4 above (moving the "Delegation results" tables out of this article and into the individual state articles). First, though, I'd like to agree on 1) a standard for naming all the individual state articles, 2) a standard for the result tables and their placement in the individual state articles (couldn't we build a template for that, like they have for infoboxes?), and 3) continuing to develop the individual event result tables. And let's not forget that we may want to employ the same ideas on this article's Republican sister. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 09:20, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Well guys, I just drank the Kool-Aid. I’ll support removing the section, but only if the following conditions are first met and agreed upon.
1. All state contest pages are standardized. I don’t think an infobox is necessary or practical for two reasons. One being that most pages have (or should have) state election templates, which take up the left sides of the articles. Also, we have an existing template to easily navigate to other contest pages. More extensive pages (which are generally the earlier ones) should note be significantly altered.
2. The exact result tables used on this page are moved to individual pages. Full results from official sources should be used. The same color should be used for candidates that dropped out before the contest was held. An explanation as to the color should appear on every page.
3. The states’ full delegate choosing process is explained on individual pages.
That’s all I can think of right now. I also hope to implement these changes to the Republican results page. I guess editors have lost interest in that one for some reason. – Zntrip 02:02, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
I probably shouldn't have said "infoboxes" because I didn't mean shaded boxes containing text, images, and links. I was just using infoboxes as an example of a template that takes many parameter inputs. Instead, what I was getting at is a template that takes several input parameters and then dyanmically draws a primary/cuacus/convention results table. This would give editors the flexibility to easily update the result tables according to the particulars of an individual state's process while retaining a standardized layout and methodology that applies across all result tables in the presidential primaries. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 10:39, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

While I'd like us to proceed sensibly and with consensus, I think we should take care not to slow down the process of improving this article by placing too many requirements ahead of Wikipedical's proposal to remove the "Delegation results" section. For example, if we decide to accept the proposal we might want to go ahead and move the results tables to their respective state primary articles ahead of building any templates. We could manually keep the individual articles up to date until we made a template. Another example, we might want to consider separating my suggestion that we standardize the names of the individual state articles from Wikipedical's proposal. Renaming the articles may require gathering consensus from their regular editors, and with so many articles, that could take a long time. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 10:39, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I say that’s go ahead and start. The basic requirements are to cut and paste the results, have a note about what the red color means, makes sure Template:2008Demprimaries is at the bottom, and the page is included in Category:United States Democratic presidential primaries, 2008. I’ll as soon as I have some time. – Zntrip 20:44, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
I agree. Let's proceed thusly:
For each state:
1. Copy and paste the results table(s) into the individual state article.
2. Temporarily replace the results table(s) in this article with a transclusion link pointing to the state article.
3. Add the red color note, Template:2008Demprimaries, and Category:United States Democratic presidential primaries, 2008 to the state article.
Once all the result tables have been copied from this article to the appropriate state articles:
4. Update the links in this article's overview table to point to the appropriate state articles.
5. Delete the transculsion links and the remainder of the "Delegation results" section from this article.
Following this procedure, we can keep this article intact without having to move all the result tables at once. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 21:42, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

So far, I've done Alabama, Alaska, and Arizona. Could someone check the individual state pages to see if I did them the right way? One reminder to everyone: remove the link to the state in the title of the table. Add a link to the state in the bold title in the introduction of the article. – Zntrip 21:50, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Your edits broke the links from the overview table. I suggest leaving the subsections under each state in place and using a transclusion link to keep the results table in the article until all the states are done. Just put the <onlyinclude></onlyinclude> tags above and below the table in the state article and {{:name of state article}} in this article to make the table appear here.
How about using the following for the color note above each results table in all the state articles instead?
Color key: Candidate has
withdrawn
That would keep the color notes somewhat consistent with this article. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 22:37, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
No problem. – Zntrip 23:31, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
I notice you've changed my above proposed color note on the state articles. Your change looks fine to me. Here's the new amended color note:
Color key: Candidate has withdrawn
--Bryan H Bell (talk) 23:18, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
I think this one would be better:
Color key: Candidate has withdrawn prior to primary
"Primary" would of course be replaced with whatever contest the article is about. – Zntrip 03:07, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
I'd rather not get too far afield from the note we're using on this page. I don't feel like "prior to primary" adds much value. Also, changing the wording of the note for each event type seems error-prone. If we had to include such a phrase, I'd prefer to substitute the more generic "contest" or "event" for "primary" so we wouldn't have to change the wording each time. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 04:00, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
People looking at a page a year from no might expect to see Edward’s name in red for the New Hampshire primary because be dropped out before the national convention. In my opinion, it simply reduces ambiguity. – Zntrip 05:32, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
Ok. How about changing the text to "Candidate withdrew prior to contest"? If that's ok, let's leave it at that. Don't want to spend too much time on just this one little note :) --Bryan H Bell (talk) 08:06, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

This is working out well. -- Wikipedical (talk) 03:37, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I agree. Though I was skeptical at first, I think your proposal turned out to be a good idea. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 08:00, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

I hit a snag with temporarily transcluding some result tables from the individual state articles to this article. I'm unable to get it to work for states that have more than one result table. I've left a message at Wikipedia_talk:Transclusion to see if I can get some help. Since we're only transcluding the result tables temporarily, this isn't a big deal and I'll continue to move the other tables. If I can't find a solution, I'll just copy (rather than move) the problematic tables to the state articles. They could get out of sync between the two articles, but only until we delete all the state result tables from this article. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 08:30, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Zntrip, you said above at 21:50, 24 February 2008 (UTC), "Add a link to the state in the bold title in the introduction of the article." That's not quite clear to me, but I hope it doesn't mean having links within section headers. You and I already had that discussion, and I removed links from section headers as a result. Wdfarmer (talk) 05:09, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Sorry to revert your edit in which you deleted the Delegation results section, Wikipedical, but you negelected to update the Overview of results table to link to the individual articles first. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 22:28, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

 Done Moving the result tables into their respective state articles is completed. I updated the Overview of results table to point to the state articles and finally deleted the Delegation results section. I believe this change is now complete. I'd appreciate it if any other editors would care to spot-check this article and the state articles. Thanks to Wikipedical and Zntrip for their major participation in making the changes. Thanks to Subver and lil2mas as well for their input in this discussion. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 00:29, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Great work. I'm sorry for the my poor attention to this article. In these days I was very busy with the list of superdelagetes that now rocks! --Subver (talk) 05:01, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Deleting notes

Sorry, i was undoing myself because of the errors. I think the TGP notes are useless and repetitve. I think it can be removed. Space wasting more then 10K and the page need to be lighter. If you agree I'm redoing, deleting also in the other places where I forgot to do. --Subver (talk) 21:38, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Well, we do need references. – Zntrip 21:48, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
They all all the same. It can be added a single phrase: "the source of delegate number is: TGP", or another more official. --Subver (talk) 22:00, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
I agree. A single reference to a Green Papers page like this one might be better than lots of individual citations. One problem I see is that, at least in the case of Democrats Abroad, we're not using the Green Papers as our source for the number of delegate votes. I guess we could provide individual citations for those few cases that diverge from the norm. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 22:11, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Since Subver has already removed the individual citations, I've taken the initiative to add the single citation I gave above. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 22:55, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Great. --Subver (talk) 23:22, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Sounds good. – Zntrip 23:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
I agree to removing TGP-links, since the official state result will be used in the end anyway. lil2mas (talk) 02:00, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Repeated row in results table

Pennsylvannia's primary is listed twice; surely this is a coding error. I would make this change myself but I'm not super confident with the programming. --Hydeparkblvd (talk) 04:12, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Removed, thanks. It's easy editing tables, see this:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Table --Subver (talk) 04:19, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Popular vote

Isn't the total popular vote chart a bit misleading, at least when it comes to the "including Michigan" part. Obama wasn't even on the ballot in Michigan! I'm sure he had a lot of supporters there, they just didn't have anyplace to vote other than "undecided". How can we then say that those numbers are legit? I'd be fine with it if Michigan was excluded, maybe with a note saying why? Wrad (talk) 04:45, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

I propose to totally delete this table. Some states use caucuses and not primaries to choose the candidate. In some states primaries are open to everybody, in others only to specific supporters. So the sum of popular vote of every state is meaningless. Whereas the sum of obtained pledged delegates, distributed proportionally between candidates and assigned to each state proportionally to the population, is significant and reflect real people will. --Subver (talk) 04:59, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
I see the issues you raise (and also the ones raised above by Vanoden). I'm not quite sure how the numbers are derived, either. But before we delete this table, I'm hoping to hear some explanation from Paul, the editor who added it. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 08:51, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
There is a table in RCP [3] with similar data. While my opinion is with Subver that calculating the popular vote in such a fashion is meaningless, it does seem important enough to be included in the RCP and thus in Wikipedia. I've added a small paragraph on top, adjusted some of the data, removed the "Michigan" count and the "Uncommitted" count (I don't know how these two are calculated), and removed other candidates except the viable contenders Obama and Clinton (I favor including John Edwards and probably other candidates as well, but there is no data that I know of so we probably have to ask the user who added it). Herunar (talk) 15:39, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
I note that the Sabisto[sp?] Crystal Ball article had several different possible popular vote counts on the Democratic side, (ranging from Obama with 100K lead to Obama with an 800K lead before WI/HI). It all depended upon how you decided to count them. The lowest lead estimate for Obama excluded all cacuses entirely (it only counted primaries) and included MI/FL. The highest lead estimate for Obama excluded MI/FL and included the cacuses, even extrapolating out an estimate of the state popular vote in those states that the Democrats only released precient-level delegate counts combined with total number of those attending. Jon (talk) 18:42, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
Popular votes are meaningless in this election. In an actual election, a citizen's right to vote is protected. They can do absentee ballots, and they are protected from being fired from their job in order to vote. This is not true in caucuses. No absentee ballots, and a person is not protected from being fired from their job in order to participate in a caucus. Also, Michigan's results are meaningless from a popular vote perspective due to the fact that Obama was not on the ballot. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.120.135.108 (talk) 15:06, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Alphabetical Order

Why did somebody rearrange the Delegation Results alphabetically? Who wants to find a special state can either search for it with his explorer or get the date from the table above. However, people who are looking for the latest results (eg at the date after the primary/ caucus) or for the results at Super Tuesday, for instance, do not have any chance to do so. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.83.185.216 (talk) 10:24, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

See #State Delegation Order above. Andareed (talk) 10:29, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
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