My solution for the superdelegates

Over the years, I've participated in a few football pools, the kind where you make your picks each week. I've never really been in one for any money (no, I'm not protecting any potential political future, it's true), though I did win a nice trophy made out of a paper plate once. I usually do well, upper half, but I don't do it by intensive analysis.

In college, I had a thought about a fairly simple system for rating things in a competitive environment. The system is easy to program (my current version runs in Excel, just a few lines of macro code) and generates a 1-to-n ranking. And the amount of input each week is minimal, basically just entering the results of the games just played.

The biggest advantage is that the system is totally mechanistic. I put in the scores, look at the rankings, and make the picks for the next week. No agonizing over the matchups, the high emotions, the momentum - read the results off the screen and I'm done.

So here is my suggestion for the superdelegates who don't think they should be required to cast the deciding votes for the Democratic race, or don't want to be bothered by phone calls from Chelsea Clinton (or Malia or Natasha Obama, for that matter):

Right now, tell the world what criterion you will use to make your decision, make it mechanistic, and promise to stick to it. It doesn't matter which method you pick, the leader in the national popular vote, the delegate count at the time of the convention, the vote in your home state - any of these, or something else. Just make it clear that your vote will be based on something else. I predict that you will be left alone (well, mostly), and you won't have to feel that you're deciding anything. Problem solved.