I’ve been a bad, bad blogger. I haven’t posted anything in a million years, and now I’m making a post with a relevant shelf life of a couple of days. Oh, well…
I’m still perplexed about this whole Iowa dumpster fire. How could party officials be so spectacularly incompetent? Either they’re really crappy at running a caucus or they’re really crappy at cheating, maybe a combination of both. Let’s look at some of the stray tidbits of information emerging and see if any of it makes any sense.
- The Shadow App. So, a bunch of Clintonistas formed a company which made an app to do an incredibly simple task. Hell, this task would have been simple in 1955 with telephones, a couple of notebooks, a chalkboard, and an adding machine. I could write a basic web app which would do this stuff in an afternoon. (Yeah, there are some security issues I’d need help with on this scale, but fundamentally this is really basic stuff.) Mayo Pete gave them a bunch of money. Maybe that’s legal, but do these bozos have any idea how rotten that looks? Did they think nobody would find out?
They hired somebody (a high school kid, maybe?) to build this app. They used their party connections to have it used in this spectacularly important election. They flung it together long after any sane last minute. Nobody bothered to test it. Nobody bothered to train anyone in how to use it or even how to download it. Surprise, surprise, it failed. What was supposed to happen? How was it supposed to look having the least impartial crew imaginable putting together software to impartially tabulate votes in the first election of the season? Are they cultivating conspiracy theories on purpose?
- Bernie’s tabulation. There’s no secret ballot at a caucus; it’s just a bunch of people standing in groups based on who they support. So, any organization with enough personnel/volunteers could, theoretically at least, have at least one person in each precinct to count heads and report to a central tabulator. Bizarrely, the party officials were apparently surprised that Bernie actually did this. Duh, they screwed him in Iowa in 2016, and he has the largest army of volunteers US politics has ever seen. What did they think was gonna happen? So, the party started releasing incorrect results, and Bernie’s people met party officials privately and called them out. The whole vote reporting thing stopped for the better part of a day.
- Partial tallies. Then, after the delay, the party starts releasing their partial tallies. But there’s no transparency about why some precincts’ results were reported and not others. On further analysis, there’s an over-reporting of Pete-friendly precincts, and an under-reporting of Bernie-friendly precincts. It looks for all the world like the party is trying to cling to the narrative that Pete won a narrow victory for as long as possible. But we know the real results are going to come out. Why is the party shredding its last vestigial remnant of credibility so that Pete can control the media narrative for a couple of days? Everybody knows that Pete’s campaign just hits a cul de sac after New Hampshire. How much is it worth to prop up his feeble campaign for a little bit?
Furthermore, these partial tallies are riddled with “errors” which — surprise, surprise — just happen to lower Bernie and Warren’s totals. For fucks sake, people, did the party really expect anyone to believe that 497 people in Black Hawk County voted for Deval Patrick, or were they just not supposed to notice the absurdity?
In conclusion, the DNC and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership are corrupt, incompetent buffoons. Fortunately, the Bernie Tsunami is gonna wash party leadership clean, as well as taking the country in a new and better direction.