The Iowa caucus was decided by a what now?

That was the response lots of Americans had to news that during Monday night's Democratic Iowa caucus, several tightly contested precincts flipped a coin to decide whether Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders would win that precinct. The Internet was outraged that such a momentous decision could be left up to chance, and some media outlets even wrongly asserted that the decision to flip a coin was left up to individuals at the Democratic party headquarters.

All this fury is slightly misplaced—or at least many years too late.

But all this fury is slightly misplaced—or at least many years too late. The coin flip rule has been part of the Democratic Iowa caucus process for years. The only thing about it that's changed is our ability to document it.

As we've reported before, the last Democratic caucus that was actually contested was back in 2008, when smartphone use was much less widespread and Twitter had barely hit the mainstream. Before this year's caucus, we predicted that the existence of this technology would give Americans a window into the process they've rarely seen before. If the coin flip mini-drama is any indication, we were right.

Photos and videos of the coin tosses began popping up on Twitter last night, alerting the rest of the US and the media to the fact that, yes, this is really a thing.

Of course, it's fair to be critical of the process itself. It is 2016, after all! Who even carries coins anymore? But it's also important to realize what these coin tosses actually decide.

The delegates that were awarded last night do not go straight on to the Democratic Party convention this summer. Instead, they go on to their county convention, where the large group of delegates is whittled down. That group goes on to the district convention, gets whittled down again, and goes on to the state convention. It's at the state convention that the final delegates—called state delegates—are awarded.

What that means, essentially, is that each delegate awarded last night, while still important, still represents a fraction of one state delegate—the people who actually choose the nominee at the Democratic Convention. County delegates, in other words, don't carry as much weight. That's why when the results come in, they're reported not as county delegates, but as state delegate equivalents. Last night, Clinton beat Sanders by nearly four state delegate equivalents. And what that means is the outcome of the race wouldn't have changed if the coins flips had flopped in Sanders' favor.