LaJae Alvarez

Savannah Bernardo
Ricky Holt
Voting Theory Project
Group #4

The Iowa Caucus is an electoral event in which residents of the U.S. state of Iowa meet in
precinct caucuses in all of Iowa's 1,681 precincts and elect delegates (a person designated to act
for or represent another or others) to the corresponding conventions in each of the state's 99
counties; about 1% of the Nations delegates are chosen by the Iowa state convention. The Iowa
Caucus is noteworthy for the amount of media attention it receives during U.S. presidential
election years. The word caucus is thought to come from an Algonquin Indian word meaning
one who advises, encourage, and to urge, promote, incite to action. After the 1968 Democratic
National Convention protest activity, the Democratic Party decided to make changes to their
presidential nominating process by spreading out the schedule in each state. Since Iowa had a
complex process of precinct caucuses, county conventions, district conventions, and a state
convention, they chose to start early. In 1972, Iowa was the first state to hold their Democratic
caucus, and had the first Republican caucus four years later. Since then, the Iowa caucuses have
had a 43% success rate at predicting which Democratic candidate for president and a 50%
success rate at predicting which Republican candidate for president will go on to win the
nomination of their political party at that party's national convention, though they may more
reliably indicate which ones are likely to drop out owing to lack of support.
In a direct primary election, you go and vote like in a general election and choose who you want
to vote for .So, in other words, the number of "votes" a candidate receives in the precinct caucus
might not be proportional to the number of delegates he/she gets to the national convention
because there can be changes in the county caucus; In the case of direct primary election you get
the percent of delegates based on the vote. Now, keep in mind that in either system each state has
the population delegates (based on population and divided depending on the primaries) and then
there are the voted of the party leaders in that state. Lastly, the main reason the Iowa Caucuses
are important is because it is the first state in the US where a ballot is cast. Despite being tiny,
atypical of the rest of the US, and providing about 1 per cent of the nations delegates, the state is
the first indicator of whether a prospective presidential candidates support is holding up.
 After completing the above voting methods, we have decided that Marco Rubio is our
selected candidate. The reason we chose Rubio is because he was the favorable winner in most
of the voting methods. He won in the Borda Count method, Copeland Method and was our
Condorcet candidate as well. Although Trump won the Plurality method we felt that the most
favored candidate across the board should win. Cruz also won by instant run-off, but like
Trump, he did not fare well in the other methods. Jeb Bush did not win any of the voting
methods.

We decided to use the Condorcet fairness criteria since the proof was already present in
our research. Rubio was our Condorcet candidate as stated above. The Condorcet criteria is as
follows If there is a choice that in a head-to-head comparison is preferred by the voters over
every other choice, then that choice should be the winner of the election.

If the past of the Iowa Caucus holds true then Marco Rubio will have a great chance of
becoming the Republican Party candidate. We stand behind our research and believe that the
voting methods used above are true.

Marco Rubio will be our candidate!