Bizarre, Politics

Is Iowa Ready For Democracy?

That is a silly question. Of course, Iowa is ready for democracy . . . it is just not ready to actually use it in real time. Once again, the nation is held hostage to a system that makes one long for a good speedy election from the North Korean Supreme People’s Assembly. Putting aside the question as to whether Iowa should be the first critical measure of the national election, the caucus system makes as much sense as selecting candidates by counting spontaneous flash mobs. It is clearly time to end the Iowa caucuses in favor of a system this side of the seventh century. I stayed up to around 11 and then threw in the towel. Many have call justice delayed justice denied. I just call it Iowa.

The blame is being put on a serious coding error in the App developed by a company called Shadow, which started out as Groundbase, co-founded by Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, who worked for the tech team on Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination. This politically connected firm also secured a contract with Nevada which was planning to use the same App in two weeks.

For the Sanders people, the problems seemed all too suspicious from 2016 when they accused Clinton allies who dominated the process irregularities and delays. The delay robbed non-establishment candidates like Sanders from holding valuable prime time events claiming momentum. Worse yet, Sanders campaign officials insist that the figures showed them winning, but that suddenly reports surfaced of Biden doing better than most polling. Even CNN, which has been widely criticized for its anti-Sanders coverage, reported that one polling site had to be moved to a larger space to accommodate the huge surge of Sanders supporters. This follows the spiking of the leading traditional poll on the night before the elections, a poll that some claimed showed a surge of the non-establishment candidates challenging Biden. With an electorate reportedly focused on electability, the loss of the poll was viewed as a blow to challengers like Sanders and Warren. Moreover, Sanders was counting on a fundraising boost with the victory on Monday night. The Iowa Democratic Party gutted that key money pull with this bizarre failure. It clearly benefited Biden and hurt Sanders — a failure and suspicious situation for Sanders supporters.

The candidates were forced to go to New Hampshire without results. Zero results. Pete Buttigieg declared victory, sort of, while Sanders’ campaign continued to maintain that their data shows a victory. The Biden campaign is already complaining of “acute failures” in the system — an attack that could be used to question the results. Biden advisers like Symone Sanders were on the air this morning questioning any results, so the failure of the Iowa Democratic Party may allow Biden to question whether he actually lost in the state (the very suspicion raised by the Sanders campaign). Symone Sanders is already calling the result “compromised.” The only ones not talking are Democratic Party officials.

The Iowa Democratic Party announced that it would have to release results on Tuesday — leaving the candidates, campaigns, and media in a “dressed up and no where to go” predicament. Panels of the experts eventually filled in their time by discussing the lunacy of the Iowa caucuses and the continued incompetence of election officials. In the meantime, the usual stories of chaos and coin flips filtered out of the state. What should also worry the DNC is the decline in first time participants. It was hoped that the race would generate more excitement and a sharp rise in participation.

The Democratic Party said that there were “inconsistencies,” an ironic explanation since the caucus system itself is one giant inconsistency with the logical approach of virtually every other state. Some blamed the App. Some blamed Des Moines. Some blamed the Democratic establishment. I blame the caucuses.

The Framers rejected pure democracies found in the ancient Greek city-states as inherently chaotic and unstable. Iowa makes ancient Greece look like the model of efficiency.

67 thoughts on “Is Iowa Ready For Democracy?”

  1. Even the BBC was calling this a “disaster”, a curious lack of detachment for British tax-supported media unless their editotial staff were looking forward for a more malleable US President after November.

    I don’t see that. Iowa’s Democrats gathered up their paper ballots and counted votes the old way, and that showed Biden in fourth place behind Buttigieg, Sanders and Warren with 62% of the ballots in.

    So, a disaster for whom? Iowan Democrats voted for whom they trusted most. Perhaps the press – back in 2016, Stephen Colbert stared deeply in Joe Biden’s eyes and begged him to re-enter the Presidential race (which had to give the party’s anointed one, Hillary Clinton, warm fuzzies). I don’t watch Colbert if I can possibly avoid it, so I have no way to gauge his degree of angst tonight. But his bosses can’t be thrilled tonight.

    Colbert spent years (in Viacom/CBS’s farm team Comedy Channel’s “The Colbert Report”) sharpening a vicious parody of Limbaugh and O’Reilly. Sumner and Shari Redstone, the owners of National Amusements, which owns CBS and Comedy Channel, obviously liked Biden better than Clinton.back then.

    Iowan voters putting Biden in fifth place in their caucus provoked a revelatory cry of anguish from much of the political press. Their man hadn’t just “not won”, but showed up behind the ex-mayor of South Bend, IN, Senator Sanders (no one else’s dear friend in Democratic politics but AOC and her squadmates), and Senator Warren, who hadn’t been making much noise in the polls.

    Presidential campagins are enormously costly. I think the real disaster for press commentators who slant left was Senator Biden and the massive investment in his campaign losing an immense amout of fungibility. Losing good money because your fair-haired boy was outed as a nepotist who bullied other countries to let his addled son feather his net with graft has to sting.

  2. And wherever Biden went corruption was sure to follow. This saying used to be about Mary

  3. “Is Iowa Ready For Democracy?”

    “That is a silly question.”

    – Professor Turley
    ______________

    Oh, you betcha!

    The silly part is that, since the principles of the Communist Manifesto as Central Planning, Control of the Means of Production (i.e. regulation), Redistribution of Wealth and Social Engineering were implemented and have been extant in America for over 100 years, the “democracy” of the “democrats” is de facto communism.

    Better question: Is Iowa (i.e. America) ready for communism? Who isn’t ready for “free stuff” always and everywhere! All America has to do is fully and irrevocably abrogate and expunge the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights – although, it may very well be the case that the Supreme Court has already done that – because those documents of fundamental law oppose, and definitively and immutably deny, any and all forms of communism.

  4. IOWA BOTCHED 2012 REPUBLICAN RACE

    Rick Santorum won the Iowa caucuses Thursday — 16 days after the last vote was cast — when the state Republican Party said a final count showed him 34 votes ahead of Mitt Romney.

    That was a shift from the preliminary results the party announced after the Jan. 3 caucuses, which showed the former Massachusetts governor winning Iowa by eight votes. Iowa Republican leaders said that they had still not received results from eight of the state’s 1,774 precincts.

    The news does not alter the bottom line of the GOP primary race: the number of delegates that Santorum or Romney will receive at the national convention. For all their hype, the Iowa caucuses do not actually decide that.

    But Santorum’s belated victory did seem likely to alter the pundits’ narrative of the Republican race — by demonstrating that the long-shot former senator from Pennsylvania did, indeed, have the ability to beat the front-runner.

    Edited from: “Santorum Finished 34 Votes Ahead Of Romney In New Iowa Poll Tally, Votes From 8 Precincts Missing”

    The Washington Post, 1/19/12

  5. hysterical

    🤣

    “Van Jones: Iowa Caucus Delay a ‘Debacle’ — 90% White Caucus Not Viable”

    CNN political commentator and former Obama adviser Van Jones declared Monday night the Iowa caucus delay on results was a “debacle.”

    Jones said, “This is starting to feel like possibility a real debacle where if there is some technical problems they are not disclosing we could be very late on this.”

  6. Don’t Let Iowa Come Back In 2024

    Three years from now, the Republican and Democratic parties in Iowa will tell us that they’ve worked out all the kinks, everything is fine and we can proceed with the caucuses just like usual, with those supposedly civic-minded and well-informed Iowa voters ready to tell the rest of us who our president ought to be.

    Don’t let them get away with it. No one state deserves the status Iowa took for itself, and it has shown it can’t manage it. The country needs to take control of the election out of Iowa’s hands.

    Edited from: “The Time Has Come To kill The Iowa Caucus”

    Today’s Washington Post”

    1. Why? Because Iowa didn’t give the DNC an orderly anointment ceremony?
      I hope Iowa has an answer for that, and that they don’t scrimp on the barracks poetry.

  7. Testing for November 2020 when the dastardly Putin bot farms disrupt the will of the people known as an election?

  8. Paraphrasing Rich Lowry: After spending years demonizing Russia! for hacking the 2016 election, Democrats hack their own election.

    You can’t make it up.

    2. Scott, I think “Skippy Roo” is telling us that Putin was doing a trial run by screwing with the Iowa caucus.
      Now if the Democratic Party itself will just say that “it was them Ruskies that done it”, they can get themselves off the hook and pin the blame on Vlad.🤗

  10. Judicial Watch’s analysis of Iowa’s state registration rolls is based on official voter registration data provided by Iowa to the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) for publication in 2019. Data concerning such registrations must be reported to the EAC by law under federal regulation 11 C.F.R. § 9428.7.

    Based on this federal data, Judicial Watch found eight counties with registration rates over 100% of the voting age population. The next reliable report on Iowa’s registration rolls won’t occur until after the November election, as the EAC’s next report will be released in 2021.

  11. The caucus conception is that of a ‘gathering of neighbors’. People should be discussing politics with their neighbors, since the person who is selected is supposed to represent a wide cross-section of people. The group with the best arguments for why someone ought to be elected should also represent the candidate with strongest arguments.

    “Participants indicate their support for a particular candidate by standing in a designated area of the caucus site (forming a preference group). An area may also be designated for undecided participants. Then, for roughly 30 minutes, participants try to convince their neighbors to support their candidates. Each preference group might informally deputize a few members to recruit supporters from the other groups and, in particular, from among those undecided. Undecided participants might visit each preference group to ask its members about their candidate.” From Wkipedia.

    One of my Iowan family members was still undecided a day before the caucus. There is no really clear-cut, stand-out candidate. This turmoil is probably a broad swath of the citizenry, so the DSM Register may have simply indicated ‘Undecided’ as the lead candidate if they had run a poll.

    I also think an app is prone to meddling, so it doesn’t surprise me there were problems.

  12. Once Again Turley Is Stoking ‘Poor Bernie’ Sentiment

    From the column:

    “Sanders was counting on a fundraising boost with the victory on Monday night. The Iowa Democratic Party gutted that key money pull with this bizarre failure. It clearly benefited Biden and hurt Sanders — a failure and suspicious situation for Sanders supporters”.
    …………………………………………..

    What is up with Turley?? He has essentially become a Bernie Bro. Though we know Turley has no intention of actually voting for Sanders. So what is Turley’s interest here??

    For years the media has politely questioned Iowa’s outsize role in determining presidential nominees. What’s more, the entire design of the caucus, with its byzantine procedures, has long been the subject of critical analysis.

    Eight years ago the Iowa Caucus had trouble with the Republican race between Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz. There was no clear winner there. Four years ago the Caucus failed to find a clear winner in the Clinton / Sanders race. So it is, perhaps, not surprising that the Caucus failed so spectacularly last night.

    Apparently the Democratic contest was too close and crowded for the Caucus to determine. And this outcome was telegraphed when an important pre-caucus poll failed to materialize. That should have been a red flag to warn us of the meltdown that occurred.

    If any good comes out of this mess it might be the end of the Iowa Caucus as a major campaign event. For far too long Iowa has had a disproportionate and unjustified influence over primary campaigns.

    1. Eight years ago the Iowa Caucus had trouble with the Republican race between Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz.

      No it didn’t. In early 2012, Ted Cruz was a partner in a Philadelphia law firm working in their Houston and Washington offices.

      1. Tabby, Cruz was elected to the Senate that year. I got him as and Santorium confused.

        1. I got him as and Santorium confused.

          From dissimilar parts of the country, worked in dissimilar segments of the legal profession, have dissimilar family life, have dissimilar education, have dissimilar upbringing, have names that don’t resemble each other at all. You’re on the ball today.

    2. “Several Iowa caucus votes ended in coin tosses when delegate counts were too close to call”

      Several videos emerged online of coin tosses being used to determine which candidate should receive delegates in the event of a tie.

      In embarrassing twist, Democrats have no Iowa caucus results
      What went wrong: Tech problem with mobile app causes Iowa caucus chaos
      Democratic candidates are desperate to win Iowa tonight. But does it matter?
      “Ready?” a man says before he flips a coin to break a tie between Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg.

      “Tails!” a Sanders supporter shouts as the coin flips in the air and falls to the gymnasium floor.

      The coin ended up falling on tails, awarding Sanders an additional delegate over Buttigieg.

      Similar scenarios played out across the state.

      https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/democrats-resort-to-coin-tosses-to-break-ties-in-iowa-1.4796425?cache=yes%3FclipId%3D104056%3FclipId%3D89750%3FclipId%3D64268

    3. Correction For Above:

      It was Rick Santorum, not Ted Cruz, who may have actually beat Mitt Romney in the 2012 Iowa Caucus. The difference in their final tallies was close enough to render that race hopelessly deadlocked.

  13. No they ae not given the amount that know this is not a democracy and never will be. It will remain a Constitutonal Republic which retained one part of the Greek ideal democracy system or it will go completge Marxist Leninist socialism and that after defeating the US Military.

  14. It is clear that Trump, working with Russia, hacked the app being used to make the Democrats look bad. What we need is a special council investigation.

  15. Meanwhile in a conference call between Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and BrokenAPP tech support, Hyderabad, India…

    Hillary: “You stupid Dalits. All you had to do was hardcode Caucus_Winner to equal Candidate_Biden and create a stored procedure to decrement Candidate_Sanders_Count until it was ten percent below Candidate_Biden_Count. How hard can this be?”
    BrokenAPP Database Admin: But we went into a divide by zero error because Joe Biden received no votes, so the app crashed. Nobody here had the presence of mind to think Mr. Biden would receive no votes so we never thought to write an exception.
    Hillary: “Fools, we told you that Buttigieg was to receive no votes not Biden.”
    BrokenApp Admin: “We gave Mr. Biden a superuser account, he should have noticed the error and changed the vote according to whatever you wanted.”
    Joe Biden: “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even own a computer”

    1. haha…they could have simplified it even more by just putting a big sign over a trash can: “INSERT VOTES HERE”

    3. That must have happened before he made a comment that he was confident that “when everything has been counted, I’m sure we’ll end up with more than our fair share of delegates!”

  16. on npr today:

    FUBAR … you know what that means guys yes?
    look it up if you dont

    INCONSEQUENTIAL….. IRRELEVANT

    Iowa a “hot mess” !

    Iowans are a “handful of Midwesterners”

    Iowans “Racially skewed” against the “Democratic majority”

    BOTTOM LINE:

    DEMOCRAT FUNCTIONARIES BLAME WHITE DEMOCRATS!

    White Democrats: we welcome you to the Republican party!

    FLYOVER NOW, FLYOVER FOREVER!

  17. The Democrats should tell Iowa to stuff it. There is every reason to do so. First, Iowa is lily white. Second, votes are made in public so grandstanding and fear are both factors inimical to the secret ballot. Third, under Iowa law convicted felons are banned for life from voting, even though they’ve paid their debt to society. Iowa has the most restrictive ban on felon voting rights in the United States. There were 69,000 felons at last count (in 2012) in Iowa who were not allowed to vote. Fourth, the news media in Iowa is Republican. Fifth, the population of Iowa is not representative of the rest of America. Sixth, the archiac caucus system promotes and legitimizes electioneering at the voting place.

  18. These people can’t even stuff a ballot box without goofing it up.

    And who wrote that broken APP that failed to count the votes, the lowest bidder in Hyderabad? Their tech support was probably sleeping since they are eleven hours ahead of Iowa.

    Maybe next time they should hold it on Io instead of Iowa. At least then the scientific world would know for certain there is no intelligent life on Io.

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