OK, on Saturday the Secretary of State’s office released the final official canvass of the vote in California.  The statewide numbers are here.  The district-level numbers are here.  A few notes:

• Turns out that, in final balloting, Hillary Clinton surged to 62.88% of the head-to-head vote in CA-51, giving her a 3-1 split in that district.  So the final delegate numbers will be 204-166.  So Clinton got 54.4% of the head-to-head vote against Barack Obama, and 55.14% of the delegates.

• The final percentage spread between Clinton and Obama was 8.3%, noticeably lower than previous reports.

• We had over 5 million voters participate in the California Democratic primary.  That’s 55% of the total votes cast and over SEVENTY-FOUR PERCENT of registered Democratic voters.  Wow.  Those numbers are here.  We also received two million more votes in the Democratic primary than in the Republican primary.  The total turnout was the highest ever by raw numbers, and the highest as a percentage of registered voters since 1980, when some guy named Reagan was on the ballot.

You can get to all the numbers from here, a lot of fun stuff in there.

So I’m watching Countdown, and Olbermann brings up the delegate math in the wake of Barack Obama’s victory in Mississippi.  He teases a discussion with Chuck Todd about “changes in the delegates in Texas, one week after the voting, and changes in the delegates in California, one MONTH later!”

So I think to myself, “Self, are you about to be mentioned on Countdown?”  Because, as has been well-documented, it was changes originated on this website that led to the national media meekly changing their delegate totals to reflect reality.

So Chuck Todd comes on the show, and Olbermann asks him about California, and Todd hems and haws about there being “a lot of absentee and provisional ballots counted late” in the state, which is true, and about how some 3-1 delegate splits in various districts changed to 2-2, which is also true.  Then he said, “and so when all the votes came in, it turns out Obama netted four delegates out of these districts in the last week.” (rough transcript)

Yeah, that’s actually kind of a lie.  There has been no movement in the delegate count since CA-53 flipped to Obama on February 15.  Most of the delegate changes happened very early.  MSNBC just turned away from the counting, neglected to pay attention, and now makes the demonstrably false statement that Obama netted delegates “in the last week.”

What actually happened was that my post about the real delegate counts got picked up by the Wall Street Journal and shamed the entire national media into getting it right.  But I guess that wouldn’t sound too good on Countdown.

It’ll sound good in my email to Keith.

The Wall Street Journal has a writeup on my findings of the discrepancy between the national media’s California delegate counts and, you know, the actual count.  

A California politics blogger has argued that Sen. Clinton won 36 more pledged delegates in the state than Sen. Obama, rather than the 44-delegate margin that has long been included in the news organizations’ tallies. A spokesman for the state party confirms the blogger’s numbers.

The shift, if validated once the state certifies its election results this week and the party chooses its delegates, is a reminder that the commonly reported delegate totals are mere estimates, subject to change as states finalize election results. It also highlights how a blogger with intense focus on the numbers may be faster than the established delegate counters.

David Dayden, who blogs at the site Calitics and serves on its editorial board, wrote last week that Sen. Clinton won 203 of the state’s 370 pledged delegates – and not the commonly reported total of 207. He relied on updated vote totals from the state, based on late counts of absentee and provisional ballots. Later, when he noticed that several major news organizations still were showing Sen. Clinton with 207 delegates, he wrote a follow-up post explaining his calculation and exhorting, “I know math is hard and everything, but get out your calculators, people.”

I’ve long since given up on trying to correct the misspelling of my name, the most misspelled five-letter word in the English language.  But the author did a good job describing the situation.  The “delegate counters” at the media outlets have pretty much ignored these states once Election Day ends.  As Bob Mulholland rightly points out in the piece, this count has been this way for at least two weeks.  There was ample time to catch up.  But it took public pressure to get them to do it:

The New York Times’s page for California results shows the 207-163 result, but a page listing delegate totals for each state showed the 203-167 margin. NBC and CBS still showed the 207-163 margin. An inquiry to New York Times polling editor Janet Elder wasn’t returned. An NBC spokesman told me, “Apparently, there are discrepancies between the state count and the individual county tallies.” Kathy Frankovic, director of surveys for CBS News, told me, “delegate allocation is a work in progress.” (UPDATE: Ms. Frankovic told me later Monday that CBS would update its totals to reflect the 203-167 margin. “Thanks for alerting us to the problem,” she said.)

NBC is spinning madly.  They just stopped paying attention.

The official canvass will be done on March 15, and we’ll know at that point what the final number is.  Until then, I wouldn’t trust anything on those “delegate scoreboards”.

Yesterday I wrote a diary proving that the national media had their delegate counts completely wrong for weeks.  I sent an email to the AP referencing this and asking them to change their counts.  

Well, here’s where we are after Day 1.  Real Clear Politics changed their count.  The New York Times changed their count.  CBS has not.  MSNBC has not.  CNN still has it at 204-161 with five delegates undecided.

To the Times and RCP: you’re welcome.  To the others: get with the damn program.

I have calls and emails in to the Secretary of State’s office to confirm this, but I’m going by their own numbers.

Being that I kind of don’t pay attention to the national media’s delegate counts, I hadn’t realized that they were all getting California so very, very wrong, and in fact are about 800,000 votes off from the official tally.  Apparently many news organizations predict that Clinton will reap 207 delegates from California, and Obama 163.  MSNBC has this.  Real Clear Politics has this.  CBS has this.  The New York Times has this.  CNN has it as 204-161 with 5 to be decided.  They’re all simply wrong, and I know math is hard and everything, but get out your calculators, people.

Here’s an example at MSNBC’s site.  They list 2,144,251 votes for Clinton and 1,746,013 for Obama, which was right… about two weeks ago.  The actual official returns, readily available at the Secretary of State’s website, are 2,553,784 for Clinton and 2,126,600 for Obama.  That’s really, really off.  The final percentage is 8.7% and MSNBC lists it as 10%.  And that translates to a 70-59 split in delegates statewide.  They’re probably getting that wrong, too, not recognizing that there are two kinds of statewide delegates which are calculated separately.  When you add in the district-level delegate allocation (and I could list them all, but trust me on this), you get 203-167.  It takes about 10 minutes to come up with this and it’s completely irresponsible for the national media to have this wrong for over two weeks, and to relentlessly show a graphic of delegate counts with bad, outdated information.  In fact, it calls into question ALL of their other counts.

MSNBC, The New York Times, CBS, CNN and RCP need to get this right, today.  They’re screwing up and hurting America (again).  What a bunch of incompetents.

UPDATE: Just to embarrass the national media further, I’m going to show my work on the flip.

I noted the popular vote totals before: 2,553,784 for Clinton and 2,126,600 for Obama.  All other candidate totals drop out because they’re under 15%, so the statewide delegates are factored by proportion of the head-to-head vote.  There are 81 at-large delegates and 48 PLEO (Party Leader/Elected Official) delegates.  If you do the math, Hillary got 54.56% of the head-to-head, and that factors to a 44-37 split on at-large and a 26-22 split on PLEOs.

So we’re at 70-59.  The delegate allocations for each of the 53 districts are here.  The district-wide returns are here.  The key numbers are:

It takes 62.5001% of the head-to-head vote for a 3-1 split in a 4-delegate district.

It takes 58.3301% of the head-to-head vote for a 4-2 split in a 6-delegate district.

In the 21 CDs with an odd number of delegates, the presidential candidate with the most votes gets the most delegates in each of those CDs.

So, and you can do this math yourself given all the parameters outlined for you:

District   Delegates  Obama   Clinton

CA-01           5               3             2

CA-02           4               2             2

CA-03           4               2             2

CA-04           5               2             3

CA-05           5               3             2

CA-06           6               3             3

CA-07           5               2             3

CA-08           6               3             3

CA-09           6               4             2

CA-10           5               2             3

CA-11           4               2             2

CA-12           6               3             3

CA-13           5               2             3

CA-14           6               3             3

CA-15           5               2             3

CA-16           4               2             2  (this one is really close, but she has 62.47% of that vote)

CA-17           5               2             3

CA-18           4               1             3

CA-19           4               2             2

CA-20           3               1             2

CA-21           4               1             3

CA-22           4               2             2

CA-23           5               3             2

CA-24           5               2             3

CA-25           4               2             2

CA-26           4               2             2

CA-27           5               2             3

CA-28           5               2             3

CA-29           5               2             3

CA-30           6               3             3

CA-31           4               1             3

CA-32           4               1             3

CA-33           5               3             2

CA-34           4               1             3

CA-35           5               3             2

CA-36           5               2             3

CA-37           5               3             2

CA-38           4               1             3

CA-39           4               1             3

CA-40           4               2             2

CA-41           4               1             3

CA-42           4               2             2

CA-43           4               1             3

CA-44           4               2             2

CA-45           4               1             3

CA-46           4               2             2

CA-47           3               1             2

CA-48           4               2             2

CA-49           4               2             2

CA-50           5               2             3

CA-51           4               2             2

CA-52           4               2             2

CA-53           5               3             2

If you add that all up, the district totals are 133 for Clinton and 108 for Obama.  Add that to the 70-59 statewide split, and it’s 203-167.

Nice job, national media.

Today the results of the February 5 primary become official.  The final spread in the popular vote between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is 8.9%.  Clinton garnered 51.8% to Obama’s 42.9%.  The final delegates will be 203 for Clinton to 167 for Obama.  This roughly averages out to the exact spread in the head-to-head popular vote (Hillary got 54.6% of the head-to-head vote and 54.8% of the delegates), so the convoluted delegate apportionment system worked in the case of California.

I’m also pleased to announce that 47,153 “double bubble” votes were counted in Los Angeles County.  The expectation on the day of the election was that none of these ballots from decline to state voters would be counted, but the pressure put on by the Courage Campaign and other groups led to this result.  And by the way, 51% of those votes went to Hillary Clinton and 42% to Barack Obama, so those who insisted upon viewing this through some partisan lens can respectfully shut the fuck up.  This was about voter rights and remedying disenfranchisement; it always was, even though it had no material impact on the overall election.