There is suspicion in the air in Iowa. Was the problem really a glitch or was it done on purpose? I really have no clue but by just the sheer number of errors, it could raise doubts in anyone’s mind that the DNC is out to deny Bernie Sanders the nomination yet again. It is doubly suspicious because of the4ties between Shadow and the Buttigieg campaign.
Shadow is a subsidiary of ACRONYM, whose founder and CEO Tara McGowan is married to Michael halle, the senior advisor to presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. Before the voting in the caucus took place who would have expected Buttigieg to win it let alone do well? On the other hand Iowa has been known to go for dark horses before so it would be no surprise if they did it again.
If it is a scheme, the DNC is playing with fire. They were able to get away with it in 2016 because Bernie sold out to the DNC with the use of a private jet to travel around the country promoting the Clinton candidacy and his voters turned up on election day, but, if they do it this time, hundreds of thousands of Bernie supporters could very well decide to stay home.
“The results released by the Iowa Democratic Party on Wednesday were riddled with inconsistencies and other flaws,” Nate Cohn, Andrew Fischer, Josh Katz, Denise Lu, Charlie Smart and Ben Smithgall reported for the Times. “According to a New York Times analysis, more than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, that were missing data or that were not possible under the complex rules of the Iowa caucuses.”
“In some cases, vote tallies do not add up. In others, precincts are shown allotting the wrong number of delegates to certain candidates,” the report continued. “And in at least a few cases, the Iowa Democratic Party’s reported results do not match those reported by the precincts.”
To summarize, the results are wrong in so many different ways that it may be impossible to ever produce a truly accurate tally of who won the Iowa caucuses.
Here are some examples of types of detected errors:
- Candidates who were viable after the first alignment sometimes lost support upon final alignment (This violates caucus rules).
- More voters are recorded in the final alignment than were recorded in the first alignment (New voters are not allowed to join the caucus after first alignment).
- Some precincts awarded candidates more state delegates than the precinct was allotted.
- Some candidates won more votes but received fewer delegates than other candidates.
- One precinct award all of Bernie Sanders’ votes to Deval Patrick, and all of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) to Tom Steyer, apparently due to someone entering data on the wrong column or row of a spreadsheet.