Will the Clintons' political machine say Democrats Abroad don't matter?

Barack Obama has hit his 11th straight win thanks to primary for Democrats Abroad, a primary for over 20,000 Democrats living around the globe.

More than 20,000 U.S. citizens living abroad voted in the primary, which ran from Feb. 5 to Feb. 12. Obama won about 65 percent of the vote, according to the results released Thursday.

Voters living in 164 countries cast votes online, while expatriates voted in person in more than 30 countries, at hotels in Australia and Costa Rica, at a pub in Ireland and at a Starbucks in Thailand. The results took about a week to tabulate as local committees around the globe gathered ballots.

"This really gives Americans an opportunity to participate," said Christine Schon Marques, the international chair of Democrats Abroad.

There is no comparable primary among Republicans, though the GOP has several contests this weekend in U.S. territories, including party caucuses in Puerto Rico Sunday.

Of course, like everything else with the democratic Party, the system for calculating the final tally of delegates is screwed up, so we won't know how many pledged delegates will end up behind each candidate :

The Democrats Abroad controls seven pledged delegates at the party's national convention this summer. However, the group's system of dividing the delegates is unique, and could create an anomaly in which Obama and Clinton end up with fractions of delegates.

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. Obama won 2.5 and Clinton won two, according to 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.
The system creates the possibility that Obama and Clinton could each end up with an extra half vote at the convention, Schon Marques said.

I honestly don't get why they had to multiply the amount of delegates when they only have 7 votes. It's ridiculous and another reason why we need to put an end to this delegate BS.

Let's have direct election of the nominees and turn primaries into run-offs. That way each vote counts equally while saying "Superdelegates, be damned".

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