Every four years, Americans vote in the presidential elections. But even before November’s presidential election, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Republican National Committee (RNC) must first choose which respective candidates to run. This process, which occurs in each state, is called the primaries.

Citizens vote in the primaries for delegates who will attend the party nominating convention in the summer, who will in turn vote for the candidate that the people chose. Delegates are high ranking members of the respective political parties. In the DNC, they are proportionally assigned within states by population and split up based on state votes. In the RNC, there are states that are winner-take-all, so the victorious candidate receives all of the state’s delegates.

Primary votes are not the only deciding factors in the nomination process. There are also superdelegates who can vote for whichever candidate they like at the convention, and exist so that if the party feels the people’s choice for a nominee is wrong, they can vote otherwise.

The primary system receives criticisms for compression effects it can have. Starting with Iowa early in January each election year, states clamor to be early in the primary process, hoping to exert more influence on the nominations through the bandwagon effect. (Technically, Iowa, in addition to 15 other states, holds a caucus, not a primary. A caucus is a face-to-face meeting of party members to discuss affairs and then vote, while a primary is where members just vote.)

In effect, the primary process does not stretch from March to July, but from a very compressed time frame between January and March. The states that have later primaries thus may be disadvantaged because if a candidate already has a significant lead, he would owe less to these states when he does become president. Super Tuesday, which occurred this year Feb. 5, was created in the 1980s as a remedy for this problem, making 22 states have their primaries on the same day, forcing candidates to choose where and when to spend their resources.

Despite the intended remedial effects of Super Tuesday, problems still arise. This year, because Michigan and Florida broke unwritten rules of holding their primaries on or after Super Tuesday, the DNC rendered the Democratic votes of these two states useless. According to social studies teacher Phil Lyons, the states that try to move up their primary dates early complicate the entire campaign process. “The states’ race to be first has a negative effect,” he said. “It’s a bad idea in general because it expands the campaign time, which increases the amount of money candidates have to make. Anytime you add money, the situation becomes worse.”