I would like to bring up the largely overlooked presidential campaign of my longtime imaginary unicorn, Chauncey. He’s compassionate and, like most unicorns, embraces a sensible fiscal policy.

I believe he has the single-horned toughness to keep our country safe and the passion to Make America Magical Again.

While he has not been on the ballot in any state and has no pledged delegates, I demand that he be considered at both the Republican and Democratic national conventions this summer, regardless of rules requiring that candidates actually exist.

While this may sound out of touch with reality, it’s not as far afield as you might think from the griping we’re hearing in the presidential primary campaign.

Many voters, both Democratic and Republican, seem to believe their candidate can and should win simply because they want that candidate to win. The fact that there are rules and a process that must be followed is irrelevant, and anything short of victory will lead to cries of theft and accusations of un-American skulduggery.

The candidates themselves and their advocates are bolstering this misguided belief by prematurely calling foul on the results of an election that hasn’t even been decided yet.

On Monday, the day before Wisconsin voters handed GOP candidate Donald Trump a significant primary loss, one of the businessman’s higher-profile allies, political strategist Roger Stone, issued a threat to any Republican delegates attending this summer’s GOP convention in Cleveland.

Stone said that if there’s a contested convention, he will give out the hotel room information of any delegates who switch from supporting Trump to supporting a different candidate.

“We urge you to visit their hotel and find them,” Stone said in a radio interview.

This was a new low for Trump’s campaign, which has had so many lows it is now technically a subterranean operation. But it also shows a staggering ignorance of the Republican party’s nominating process.

If Trump doesn’t secure a majority of delegates — 1,237 — before the convention, he will go to Cleveland having to fight for support from a group of about 200 unbound delegates. (All delegates from states that held primaries are bound to the results of those primaries during the first round of balloting at the convention.) It’s unlikely he’d get enough of those delegates to push him over the 1,237-delegate hump.

That would bring the convention to a second round of balloting, at which time roughly 75 percent of all the delegates become unbound, meaning they can support whomever they want.

That’s the system. It’s not stealing, it’s the way the Republican Party has set things up, and it allows the party and its delegates to select a candidate they think will best represent the party up and down the ballot.

Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders won big in Wisconsin on Tuesday, fueling his supporters’ hopes that he can still beat Hillary Clinton for the nomination. Technically he can, but the chances of doing that remain slim, not because of underhanded tricks by the Clinton campaign but because of math.

Democrats award delegates on a proportional basis, so even on a night like Tuesday when Sanders wins, Clinton is still adding delegates.

Prior to Sanders’ Wisconsin victory, The New York Times wrote: “Mr. Sanders’ overall deficit — he trails Mrs. Clinton by about 230 delegates — is becoming so large that winning only modest victories puts the Democratic nomination farther out of his reach. He needs to win about 57 percent of the outstanding vote to win a majority of pledged delegates.”

That’s a steep hill for him to climb. Not impossible, but unlikely. And Clinton has secured a vast majority of what Democrats call superdelegates, who make up about 15 percent of the total number of delegates and can vote for whomever they want at the convention.

Sanders’ campaign has been making the case that the superdelegates, usually party leaders and elected officials, should vote in line with the popular vote. But again, that’s not how it works.

One can hue and cry over whether the system is fair, but it is the system. If you want to fight to change that, you do it before the primary. Or you don’t run as a Democrat. Saying it should work otherwise is like being behind in a football game in the fourth quarter and declaring that your touchdowns should count for 10 points each instead of 6.

And if you say the rules of an election don’t matter, then you might as well cast a vote for Chauncey. Because you’re living in a magical dream world, and good unicorns need your support.

— Rex Huppke is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.