South Carolina Delegates

To the best of my knowledge,

Like in Iowa, no South Carolina Delegates have been chosen yet. All the networks are still choosing to report this information wrong when they show Gingrich with all the Delegates. According to the resolution signed by the South Carolina GOP in August 2011, the County's will have Conventions in March and April, followed by a state Convention in May to chose the actual delegates. Their system as a 50% penalty, any candidate with 50% of the primary would get 50% of the delegates but no one got 50% so the delegates should be proportional to who's still in the race at that time, and those delegates would not necessarily by bound to vote for that candidate in Florida at the national convention.

Iowa Delegates

The Huffington Post and Fox are saying that Ron Paul is shut out of delegates with 13 going to Romney and 12 to Santorum, but the truth is NO DELEGATES have gone to anyone. The Iowa system is complicated. Here is how the delegates are selected.

Precinct caucuses will elect delegates on March 10th's county conventions, which in turn will elect (from their pools of delegate-attendees) delegates to congressional-district conventions and the June 16th state GOP convention, which will in turn elect Iowa’s delegates to the Republican National Convention.
Most importantly, perhaps, Votes for county-convention delegates aren’t too competitive on caucus night, and more attention is paid to national-delegate selection at the later convention votes.

Iowa will eventually elect delegates to the Republican Convention, but only a small percentage of the total 2,286 or 1.2%. And even these are “unbound” delegates, which means they can change their allegiance when they get Tampa in August.

To the best of my knowledge and research, this is how the Iowa system works. I know I wanted to get to the bottom of it, I'm sure some of you did as well.

Cheers,

Mike