Iowa Caucus: "Fraud for 100 Years"

The New York Times comes to the rescue of the Democratic National Committee with "How the Iowa Caucuses Became an Epic Fiasco for Democrats," a story which places the blame on last week's Iowa meltdown squarely on the Iowa Democratic Party and its chairman Troy Price:

Tom Perez, the chairman of the national committee, placed blame directly on the Iowa Democratic Party and Mr. Price.

“Troy Price was doing his best, but it wasn’t enough,” Mr. Perez said in an interview with The Times on Sunday, noting that while the national and state parties work in partnership, the Iowa Democratic Party is ultimately responsible for administering its own nominating contest.

The D.N.C. approved Iowa’s delegate selection plan, but left the state party to determine on its own how to collect and tabulate caucus results, Mr. Perez said, adding that the national party did not test the state’s app or set standards for training or preparation.

Mr. Perez said he was not responsible for what state parties and their leaders do.

“I do not conduct a performance evaluation of every party chair,” he said.

Asked whether the D.N.C. would increase its scrutiny of other caucuses run by state parties, including Nevada’s in less than two weeks, Mr. Perez said he would “implement all of the lessons learned,” but did not specify how.

This contradicts reporting from last week which said that the DNC played a critical role in the IDP's decision to go with the mobile app when it advised the state party not to report results by telephone.

Shadow Inc., the app developer, is portrayed as a well-meaning victim of IDP incompetence, having been been awarded its contract for the Iowa caucuses as late as the fall of 2019. The Times acknowledges that the company is the creation of former Clinton staffers, but it manages to airbrush Tara McGowan and ACRONYM from the narrative. By airbrushing ACRONYM, which has been the focal point for Lee Fang's reporting, as well as Max Blumenthal's, the bigger picture of the guiding influence of wealthy Democratic donors like Reid Hoffman and Seth Klarman is obscured.

Don't get me wrong. The IDP is much to blame too. At this point it seems likely that the true caucus winner will never be known:

In the Times review of the data, at least 10 percent of precincts appeared to have improperly allocated their delegates, based on reported vote totals. In some cases, precincts awarded more delegates than they had to give; in others, they awarded fewer. More than two dozen precincts appeared to give delegates to candidates who did not qualify as viable under the caucus rules.

The big takeaway from last Monday's caucus is contained in a quote from Jeff Weaver of the Sanders campaign:

“You always had to calculate these numbers, all we’re asking is that you report them for the first time,” Jeff Weaver, Mr. Sanders’s closest adviser, said he told Mr. Price on the call. “If you haven’t been calculating these numbers all along, it’s been a fraud for 100 years.”

The Sanders people suspected that they won the vote in Iowa in 2016 but there was no way they could prove it because there was no reporting requirement for the raw vote and then the vote totals after realignment, only the allocation of delegates. One of the post-2016 reforms that Bernie people pushed for was more transparency in Iowa, and in this they were successful.

Now come to find out, Iowa, the first vote of the presidential primary, is nothing but a Potemkin village. This is something that has been intuitively obvious and plain to see for my enter life.

I guess one positive outcome of the election year already is that the fraudulence of the Iowa caucuses has been undeniably exposed.