Just as Election 2000 taught us about the complications and imbalances of the Electoral College, Election 2008 is teaching us about the inner workings of the primaries.

After Tuesday’s round of voting, the spotlight now shines on two of the trickiest systems at work this primary system. They are the Texas hybrid caucus-primary and the Democratic Party’s superdelegates.

We on the East Coast have enough trouble grasping caucuses. They seem so much more meandering than a straightforward trip to the ballot box, even in Florida. But we get the general idea, and we count caucus victories as legitimate steps to the nomination.

Texans, though, just have to do things a little differently. They hold both a primary and a caucus. As if that weren’t complicated enough, they have an insanely intricate way of awarding delegates.

It’s theoretically possible that a candidate can win the popular vote in the primary, but earn fewer delegates overall after a poor showing in the caucuses. (There’s a shade of Election 2000 for you.) At the moment, we still don’t know exactly how many Texas delegates Clinton and Obama each picked up on Tuesday.

We do know, however, that the Democratic race is so tight that states alone won’t settle it. Enter the superdelegates, a raft of elite Democrats who can support whomever they want, regardless of how their districts vote. There are almost 800 of them, and with Clinton and Obama so close in the race for other, “pledged” delegates, they are very likely to decide who wins.

The party created superdelegates after Jimmy Carter lost his re-election bid, thinking that greater influence from party insiders would help strengthen candidacies. Put another way, they wanted to reduce the chances of the unwashed masses (the masses of the late 70s just seem a lot more unwashed, don’t they?) nominating another Jimmy Carter.

In the end, it comes down to which Democrat can line up 2,025 delegates. But each of those 2,025 will have arrived in a different way, and their various routes will inspire further attempts at reforming the system. That should set us up for another real-time civics lesson in 2012, so stay tuned.

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