I'm going to try not to post too much election stuff, but this is too fascinating and under-reported to not get out there.

Here's something that anyone who hasn't been following this election doesn't really know - the average voting Democrat has very little say in who the nominee will be. This year anyway. See, even though primary coverage focuses largely on who won which state, Hillary still came out ahead. She won less states, but the states are broken up into delegates, which are proportional to which districts and communities each candidate won. And delegates decide who gets the nomination. This was true in the past, but in the past the winner of each state took all the delegates, instead of them being broken up.

I like the new system. It gives each vote a little more weight. And the funny thing is, if this was the only deciding factor, Obama would currently be leading by five delegates.

Where the monkey wrench comes in is that there are these superdelegates. These are people in Congress, Governors, other ranking officials of the Democratic party (including past Presidents and Vice Presidents...there are actually a lot of people who qualify). These people can vote for whoever they want, regardless of popular vote, and will almost certainly decide the outcome of the Democratic election. I don't think it's been publicly admitted, but it's widely accepted that this system is in place to ensure that the party favorite still wins, instead of the one the people want in office.

So as of right now, Hillary is estimated to have almost 100 more superdelegates on her side. Nothing's decided, necessarily, until the Convention, but I thought this was an interesting side that isn't getting a lot of play in "the mainstream media" - depending on how you look at it, your vote is worthless because the party will pick whoever they damn well please, or your vote counts more than ever, because it's going to take a massive swing of support for Obama to take down Hillary. There are still a lot of primaries left, so it's totally possible, but the party seems intent on getting her into the Oval Office.