Search This Blog

Thursday, February 6, 2020

Even After Four Days, No Winner in Iowa -- But a Lot of Losers

No one won the Democrat Iowa caucuses.  The numbers make it look like a tie between Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, but who knows if those numbers are even right.  Two different media organizations have found big discrepancies in the count.  NBC looked at the results from about 400 precincts (about one quarter of the total) and found that in 77 of them the final number of votes cast in the second round were more than the total number cast in the first round.  That may sound complicated, but all you really need to know is that to vote in the caucus, a person had to be present at 7:00 when the doors were closed.  A first ballot was taken.  Those votes were counted.  After that, people who had supported candidates who got less than 15% of the total were allowed two choices:  they could go home or switch to one of the other candidates who exceeded 15%.  That means that the number on the second round had to be equal to or less than the first round.  In a big chunk of the randomly selected precincts, however, the impossible happened and the number went up.

So what does that mean?  Was the count in the first round too low because people's votes were ignored?  Was the count in the second round artificially increased by those doing the counting so as to favor their preferred candidate?  Were new people illegally let into the caucus late?  There's just no way to tell.  All we know is that the count is obviously flawed.

The New York Times looked at its own sample of tally sheets and found problems in more than 100 of them.  Again, these could be the result of total incompetence, or it could be an attempt by the Democrats to rig the results.

Of course, all this comes on the heels of the Iowa Democrats developing a phone app to count the vote which they didn't bother to test.  And guess what; it failed.

Things are so bad that the chair of the DNC has now called for a recanvasing of the Iowa votes, and the Iowa chair has refused.  When even the national chair of the party understands how corrupt or inept the count of caucus results has been, the Democrats are the big losers in all this.  They can't count votes, so how can they run a country.

Tonight, I saw that one Democrat in Congress is saying that Russia must be responsible for all this.  Sadly, this moron is serious.  But remember, the votes were tallied by hand at the caucus sites.  They were recorded by hand at the caucus sites.  Since the app didn't work, the hand written tallies were sent to Des Moines to party headquarters to get a statewide count.  This state wide count wasn't done over the internet.  The Russians couldn't have hacked the count unless they planted Russian agents inside the Iowa Democrat Party to mess up the count.  In other words, the whole idea is ridiculous.

Think about this.  Over the last year, Democrat candidates have spent over 1 billion dollars campaigning and pointing towards Iowa.  There were national debates that some people (not too many) watched.  All that was for naught since we are never going to know who won.  What a bunch of losers.

No comments: