I guess I'll start out with the Democrats, since their set-up is a lot more complicated. The Democrats have some national bylaws mandating that they jump through a bunch of hoops for the ostensible purpose of being fair to everybody.

That's a legacy of the 1968 national convention in Chicago, which you may recall wasn't exactly a public relations dream come true for the Democratic Party.

The way that Abe Amoros, executive director of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, explained it to me, it works like this in Pennsylvania. Each congressional district gets a certain number of delegates based on the number of people from that district who voted in the last presidential election.

The Democratic delegates are pledged, meaning they're identified on the ballot as being loyal to one candidate or other. So candidates get a certain proportion of their delegates in a given district, based on their proportion of the vote from that district.

I'll put it in simple terms. Say a district gets 10 delegates. In the primary, 70 percent of the Democrats from that district vote for Hillary Clinton, and 30 percent vote for Barack Obama.

So when that district's delegation goes to the Democratic National Convention in August, it consists of seven pledged delegates for Clinton, and three for Obama.

Simple, right? Well, not that simple. Democratic bylaws also mandate that half the delegates be women and half be men. So that complicates the selection process a bit more, although the adjusted male-to-female ratios probably make things more convenient for delegates hoping to get lucky at the convention.

Now, here's what I find odd about the whole thing. The 19th Congressional District, ours, gets four delegates. Though Hillary Clinton got more votes here than Barack Obama, the margin was close enough that each gets two of those delegates.

Which means that although Clinton beat Obama here on paper, for all practical purposes the two scored a tie in the 19th District. Of course, the pledged delegates are pledged only for the first round of voting. Beyond that, they can pretty much vote for whoever they want.

After having absorbed all that, I leaned back and closed my eyes for a while until the throbbing in my head subsided a bit.

Then I picked up the phone and called A. Carville "Peck" Foster, chairman of the York County Republican Party. Surely, the GOP would have a more comprehensible system!

At first, it looked promising in that regard. Their way of carrying out the process was certainly simpler.

Republicans in the 19th district get four delegates and four alternate delegates, should one of the delegates be unable to carry out his or her duties. (I hear they make the cocktails pretty strong in Minnesota.)

And majority vote decides who's in each group. That's it. No proportioning by a candidate's percentage of the vote in a district. No dividing things evenly by gender. If you're one of the top-four vote getters among the field of potential delegates or alternate delegates, you're in.

But things took a turn for the weird when I asked what guarantee primary voters have that the delegates will vote a certain way. Basically, they have no guarantee whatsoever.

The delegates can go out there and vote for whomever they want. Presumably, they use the votes in the respective state primaries as a guide. And I think it's a safe bet that they're not going to commit collective political suicide by going out there and nominating Ron Paul over John McCain en masse.

Theoretically, however, there's no reason why they couldn't.

So to sum it up: The Democratic nomination process has only a marginal connection to how individual party members vote in the primaries. As opposed to the Republican nomination process, which has no connection to how individual party members vote in the primaries.

This is one of those times when I start to suspect that camo-garbed wingnuts hunkered down in Montana's hill country with stockpiles of ammunition and freeze-dried food are onto something.