Accusations of Fraud and Theft Fly After Iowa Vote: HERE'S the LOWDOWN [View all]

[RiverLover]

Accusations of Fraud and Theft Fly After Iowa Vote: Here's the Lowdown
by Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet
February 3, 2016


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A colorful report of a Des Moines Democratic Party caucus from the Los Angeles Times’ Kate Linthicum shows how passionate and unpredictable caucuses can be. She found “chaos, lobbying, and even a little low-level bribery,” but offering someone a free beer to switch sides is not a major conspiracy. A more eyebrow-raising moment was captured by C-SPAN, when a pro-Hillary Clinton precinct captain didn’t appear to be accurately counting votes. That’s glaring, given the Democratic side’s photo finish, but also is not a systemic issue.

Discovering that Clinton’s campaign may have recruited and paid non-Iowans to be precinct captains was a more serious charge, as that moves toward gaming the process, as some news organizations reported. “I think this raises a very serious concern,” Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager, told Yahoo! News. Weaver “assured Bernie supporters that he’s not concerned specifically about this single out-of-state precinct captain, [but] he did insist that this could be a small link in a larger strategy by the Clinton campaign to have 'non-residents attempt to participate and be counted in the caucus.'"

That report, from UsUncut.com, shows how quickly bad behavior can be taken as the tip of a conspiratorial iceberg. They ended: “Ironically, Clinton’s people also accused Barack Obama’s team in 2008 with ‘systematically trying to manipulate the Iowa caucuses with out-of-state people.’ It’s now very possible that she’s adopted such manipulations into her own political playbook.”

Other eyebrow-raising antics occurred, raising alarm but it was inconsequential. When some caucuses ended in ties, yes a coin was used to decide the winner. But that’s the practice in a dozen states, so that should not have caused alarm—although the Sanders team later used a video of one coin toss to raise money. Reporters investigating that said it occurred perhaps two-dozen times out of nearly 1,700-plus Democratic caucus sites, benefitting both Sanders and Clinton.

The Des Moines Register reported on what was behind the totals from the very last Democrat precinct to turn it results, which gave Sanders two additional state convention delegates out of 1,400 awarded, cutting Clinton’s Iowa “victory” to two delegates. Apparently, a poor soul who volunteered to chair the caucus—after no one else came forth—didn’t know he had to submit results, the paper said. While the whole world waited, he went home and next morning had an ‘Oh My God’ moment. That’s what you get when poll workers are last-minute volunteers who are inexperienced.

However, that Register report raised the first substantial issue of magnitude: that Iowa’s Democratic Party would not release the raw caucus vote totals, but used a formula to award theoretical delegates to this spring’s statewide party convention. What’s even odder about that projection is that some 11,000 delegates, primarily divided between Sanders and Clinton, would first attend their county conventions. As NPR noted, this whole process doesn’t produce a clear winner in a tight race.

TheRegister raised the obvious question, “whether Sanders had won the popular vote in Iowa,” adding, “Sanders backers called for Iowa Democratic Party officials to release the raw vote totals.” But the party would not lift its veil on the raw vote totals nor its arcane calculations.

That led Weaver to tell the Washington Post that his campaign would never know what really happened, for all the reasons already mentioned and one more: newly deployed vote-counting software from Microsoft didn’t perfectly perform either......

Read in full~
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/accusations-fraud-and-theft-fly-after-iowa-vote-heres-lowdown