Bernie won Wyoming, but they each got 7 delegates a piece. How and why?

[Jim Lane]

12. It's bad, but not quite that bad.

A comment on reddit gives this explanation:

Of the 14 delegates, 8 are allocated "by congressional district", 4 are allocated as "at large" regular delegates, and 2 are allocated as "at large" pledged PLEO (Party Leader & Elected Official) delegates.

Doing the math on all 14 at once, Bernie would have gotten 8. But instead they do the math separately on the 8, 4, and 2. So Bernie got 4/8 Congressional District delegates, 2/4 At-Large delegates, and 1/2 PLEO delegates.

I haven't checked it out but that's plausible to me. The general rule is that states have some delegates allocated by CD (per the vote in that CD) and some by the statewide vote.

The problem here is that Wyoming has only one CD. The "vote in that CD" and "the statewide vote" are necessarily the same. Accordingly, the usual formula shouldn't be woodenly applied in the handful of small states with only one CD. In those states, the inequities that inevitably attend the rounding-off process can be minimized by lumping together the calculations for the CD delegates and the statewide delegates.

We're presumably stuck with the bad result for this cycle. For the future, though, the party should modify the rules for the one-CD states.