Pennsylvania is a Loophole Primary

I read this twice...still not sure what it means..but sure sounds like the public vote tonight means very little...DELEGATES is where it's at!!

LOOPHOLE PRIMARY
The "LOOPHOLE" type of primary, in essence, is an updated version of what is the oldest form of the Presidential Preference (as opposed to DELEGATE SELECTION) primary - dating back to when Oregon enacted the very first statute authorizing just such a primary for the 1912 election. In this, what is really the original form of the ADVISORY primary, there was both a presidential preference "beauty contest" vote and a separate DELEGATE SELECTION primary held at the same time: the voter had the opportunity to indicate a preferred candidate from among the list of names of presidential contenders on the top ballot but actually elected the delegates to the National Convention as individuals or on slates listed on a separate ballot directly beneath the presidential preference one. Since the actual delegates were being elected through a separate voting procedure, the presidential preference results were merely "advisory" giving this type of primary its original sobriquet. In theory, the state's National Convention delegates were to throw their support behind - and give their votes on the Convention floor to - the winner of the presidential preference "beauty contest": however, the hopes of the early supporters of the Presidential Primary (the majority of which were of this type) were to be dashed in presidential election after presidential election as many a state's delegation often as not ignored the "advice" of the state party's rank-and-file as expressed in the preference balloting. This type of primary first got its name of "LOOPHOLE" in 1976 when many political observers and pundits realized that, in any state still using what was - in effect - the original advisory preference/delegate selection type of primary, it was theoretically possible for a candidate to win all that state's delegates despite the McGovern-Fraser reforms which had outlawed the more blatant WINNER-TAKE-ALL preference vote in favor of the PROPORTIONAL type for Democrats: all a presidential contender had to do was to elect his slates of district and at-large delegates in the bottom delegate selection balloting and it didn't much matter how he did in the top of the ballot presidential preference "beauty contest" , a convenient "loophole" for getting around the Democratic Party's ban on WINNER-TAKE-ALL primaries, hence the name - one which caught on, as it differentiated this type of "beauty contest" primary from the ADVISORY type. The LOOPHOLE type was banned in the Democratic primaries of 1980, but exemptions were made for Illinois and West Virginia - a tribute to both the Cook County, Ill. Democratic machine and West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, respectively, being powerful enough in national Democratic Party circles to keep their states' "beauty contest" preference vote in place for that year; the subsequent Hunt "counter-reforms" restored the LOOPHOLE type as legal under Democratic Party rules for 1984 and 1988 and, while the Democratic "re-reforms" effective in 1992 had sought to discourage the use of the LOOPHOLE primary, it nevertheless survived among the Democrats in West Virginia - again, largely due to the influence of that state's Sen. Byrd on the national party hierarchy. In 1996, however, no Democratic primary was of the LOOPHOLE type. The GOP, meanwhile, has no national party rules against the use of the LOOPHOLE type and a handful of states did use it for the choosing of delegates to the Republican National Convention in 1996.