How to make your vote count Tuesday

If you're not careful in the voting booth Tuesday, your vote for president may not count.

In the Republican race, the top-ballot votes for president are considered a meaningless "beauty contest." Meanwhile, Democratic voters are operating under new rules that may not be widely known.

"This is potentially challenging to voters and they really need to understand what their party's rules are," warns Ron Michaelson, a political science professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield and the former director of the Illinois State Board of Elections.

Basically, voters pulling a Republican ballot need to vote for their presidential candidate's corresponding delegates in order for their vote to count.

On the Democratic side, voters don't need to vote for delegates, unlike in years past.

Depending on where you vote, the delegates may be listed a few sections below the presidential choice or on a completely separate ticket. The delegates are followed by the name of their presidential candidate they support in parentheses.

"It is important to read the entire ballot and understand that there are two different parts," said Illinois Republican Party spokesman Lance Trover. "The short and sweet of it is: It is important to vote the delegates."

If Republican voters don't, their vote won't really count.

Such quirks in primary voting rules provide a glimpse into the arcane inner mechanics of the primary, which are nuances that haven't mattered much to Illinois voters in the past but are vital this time around.

Before state lawmakers moved the state's primary up to Tuesday this year, the national nominations were often secured before voters had a say here in March.

This time around, candidates in both parties are still fiercely battling for support -- a brawl some say could stretch into an all-out floor fight at August's party conventions.

The primary rules can easily confuse voters, who look to the popular vote as an indication of who is ahead, not delegate counts.

"(Votes) are obviously what the media will pay attention to most," said Michaelson. "But the real story is in the delegates."

Delegates are campaign supporters who actually go to the party convention and cast their vote for their nominee.

One of the oddest ways this plays out in Illinois turns out to be a noticeable handicap for Republican candidate Mike Huckabee, who was considered a non-contender before his Iowa win thrust him into the spotlight.

Huckabee failed to get delegates on the ballot in two Chicago congressional districts and is short of a full slate in a third. So, out of the gate, he's behind three delegates of the 57 any GOP candidate could win in Illinois.

The Democratic primary used to work under this "beauty contest" system as well, but party leaders decided on a different route this year.

The vote for president at the top of the ballot does matter. The votes for delegates are mostly meaningless.

On Tuesday, the votes tallied in each congressional district will be apportioned among the candidates' delegates in each district. So, if Barack Obama wins 60 percent of the vote in a district, he will automatically win 60 percent of the district's delegates.

However, if a candidate gets below 15 percent in a district, the contender won't get any delegates and the votes will essentially get thrown out.

Because John Edwards and other contenders have dropped out but remain on the ballot, votes for those candidates likely won't add up enough to break the 15 percent threshold. If so, in the end, they won't really get counted.

About 154 Democratic delegates are divided this way in Illinois, while another 31 delegates are allotted to politicians who are free to vote however they choose during August's party convention in Denver.

Still, candidates for both parties are focused on getting the most delegates no matter how they are apportioned.

To secure the Republican nomination, the candidate needs to win 1,191 delegates across the nation.

The Democratic magic number is 2,025.

Only a few hundred delegates have been won so far.

Hillary Clinton leads Obama 232 to 158, according to a CNN analysis. On the Republican side, John McCain has 97 delegates to Mitt Romney's 74 and Huckabee's 29.

For the Democratic race, the proportional divide of delegates is helping to make it a close race. The opposite is true for the Republican primary.

"Every delegate counts for us," said J.B. Pritzker, who heads Clinton's Illinois campaign, which is hoping to get at least a few delegates from each congressional district.

Consider: Even if Clinton loses Illinois, she could still walk away with between 30 percent and 40 percent of the state's delegates. The same is true for Obama in Clinton's home state of New York. Therefore, it is doubtful many states will turn over a landslide number of delegates for either.

This proportional divide of delegates makes it possible that a clear nominee may not be chosen even after Tuesday's vote in 22 states. About 1,600 Democratic delegates are up for grabs on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the Republican winner-take-all system turns Tuesday's near-national primary into do-or-die for each GOP candidate.

"The systems are tending to elongate the Democratic nominee process while the Republican side should be basically all over by Tuesday," Michaelson said.