HILLARY CLINTON won the race for the Democratic presidential nomination after victories in primaries in California and New Jersey (where she won by large margins), New Mexico and South Dakota. Bernie Sanders scrapped a win in Montana and in caucuses in North Dakota. However, some of Mr Sanders’s most fervent supporters think that the Democratic nomination system is unfair because Mrs Clinton has won with the support of superdelegates—party politicians and non-elected bigwigs who account for 15% of the total delegates to the convention. Donald Trump has also described the Democratic system as “rigged”. Yet the Democratic system of delegates has been in place since the early 1980s to give party grandees more say in the process. Mr Sanders himself takes a more sanguine view, saying recently that the system was not rigged, “because we knew what the rules were” (though he did suggest it was “dumb”).

Leaving superdelegates aside, the process of allocating the regular delegates has been anything but unfair to Mr Sanders. These are awarded proportionally, based on a candidate’s share of the vote in a primary or a caucus. Dividing the popular vote by delegates won in each state shows that Mrs Clinton has had to work that little bit harder. In the Louisiana primary for example, she gained 37 delegates, or one for every 5,993 voters who chose her. Mr Sanders took 14 delegates, or one for every 5,163 voters who backed him. In other words, Mrs Clinton needed an extra 830 votes per delegate. In New York, Mrs Clinton won 139 delegates, or one for every 8,158 of her voters, and Mr Sanders 108, one for every 7,595 of his. The same holds for other big primary states such as Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Texas. In states that held caucuses, low-turnout contests that Mr Sanders usually won by big margins, the opposite was true. In Minnesota he was awarded 46 delegates, one for every 2,568 of his voters, whereas Mrs Clinton got 31 delegates, one for every 2,371 votes. In any event, for all the labyrinthine arguments about the process, one fact stands out: Mrs Clinton won around 3.5m more votes than Mr Sanders.