By John F. Di Leo -
At this writing, early Wednesday morning, the Democratic Party has still not released the full results of Monday evening’s Iowa caucus.
The Democratic Party tells us this is because of a technological failure – that some new app failed in tabulating the votes.
Hogwash.
Never mind that Iowa has been holding caucuses for generations without such problems… Never mind the fact that every state has been holding elections for centuries, some twice a year, some three or four times a year, without such severe failures.
This is Iowa, in a presidential year.
While Iowa is a fine state, with a great deal going on, from agriculture to education, from business to sports, there is only one reason why Iowa is in the public eye, not just nationally, but globally:
The Iowa presidential caucuses.
There simply is no overstating the fact that Iowa exists, in political terms, for this one day every four years.
It is inconceivable that a technological failure could have caused more than a couple hours of interruption in the vote tabulation.
Those of us who grew up in primary states may not be fully familiar with the way that Democrats run the Iowa caucus, so I will explain, briefly.
It isn’t like there is a steady stream of people walking in and out of a polling place, all day long, putting ballots in a box, all to be tabulated at night when the polls close, after the voters have all left. That’s how a normal primary works, and that’s how a November general election works… But it is not how the Iowa Democrat Party caucus works.
In this caucus, everything is visible. There is no secret ballot.
People show up in the evening, gather in clusters around their preferred candidates, and at the end of the evening, you count up the number of people standing with each candidate’s local rep. There are little groups like this, all around the room, as many as there are candidates.
The final result is therefore totally public. Unlike a normal election, where only the pollworkers (we call them “election judges” in Illinois) are present to do the counting, virtually every person who shows up to vote can look around the room and take his own count… and many of them immediately send emails, facebook messages or other texts to family and friends immediately.
So, for example, in a precinct of 150 people, there are 150 people who know, before they leave the room, who won the precinct. And that’s exactly the case in every single precinct in Iowa.
The claim that the count is unknown is therefore utterly disingenuous.
It is clear, and yes, everyone knows it, that the Democratic Party was simply so floored by the results that they chose not to release them until they agreed on a story. And the political infighting in the Democratic Party today is so severe that they simply can’t agree on a story.
There is certainly much to discuss about the caucus method. And yes, this may be as good a time as any to debate the relative merits of the caucus method, the primary method, and the convention method, for presidential nominee selection. They all have their advantages (honestly, as a former political activist myself, this writer personally prefers the true convention method to both primaries and caucuses. But again, they all have their strong points).
So much can be debated about these events. The way America picks its president is singular, and while the electoral college is brilliant and immutable, everything else up to that point is open to discussion, since the nominees are partisan choices, and the Constitution doesn’t get involved in parties. The selection of each party’s nominees, frankly, is not a governmental function.
Who should have the right to vote? US citizens above 25? Above 21? Above 18? Both men and women, or only men, or only women? Only property owners, or only taxpayers, or only people who have served in the military, or everyone, without restriction?
All good questions, that political science students and other philosophers have agonized over for centuries.
But there is one more key point that is especially salient today.
The Democratic Party has always claimed to be “the party of the people,” while almost always being far more elitist in its operation and management then their rivals (primarily, the Federalists, then the Whigs, then finally the Republicans). The Iowa caucuses are a perfect example of this fact.
The Democratic Party will choose its presidential nominee this summer at a nominating convention to be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There will be 4765 voting delegates to that convention.
Only 41 of those delegates were up for selection at Monday evening’s caucus.
Yes, you read that right… The first-in-the-nation presidential selection event, the Iowa caucus, only chooses 41 of the Democrats’ 4765 delegates.
Now, let’s think about this.
Iowa has a bit over 3 million people; the United States’ citizen population is a bit over 300 million. So, as population goes, Iowa is about 1% of the nation’s total
The Democratic National Convention has 4765 delegates, but only 3979 of them are selected in the primary and caucus process. The DNC has another 771 “automatic delegates” who can participate in every vote after the first one – office holders, party bosses, leaders of interest groups, etc. So 16% of their convention-goers are additional party elites.
This may not sound odd, but compare it with the Republicans, who have a completely different process for delegate selection. Of the Republicans’ 2551 total delegates, only about 150 are automatic party boss types – three per state – allocated outside the primary and caucus process. So only 6% of the Republican convention-goers are additional party elites. (This isn’t to say that Republican congressmen, state reps, and former office holders can’t be delegates too… but they have to actually run for the honor and be selected in the caucuses or primaries by the voters – it’s not handed to them by virtue of their position).
This might not be a big deal, if it weren’t for the fact that the Democrats constantly complain about the electoral college not representing the November popular vote so well… Because of its design to slightly strengthen the weight of small states, out of respect for our federalist Republican system. The party that’s so opposes this electoral college tradition practice is a similar method itself, but feels no hypocrisy… As long as they are never called on it, it must not be a problem.
In short, when you look for which party is more elitist, in terms of automatically giving honors to the nobility, the Democrats win that contest.
More important though, of course, is the issue of openness. The Iowa caucus results were buried, most likely because the Democratic Party was scared of the results, and they couldn’t decide how to spin them.
Fifty years ago, Chicagoans of this writer’s generation knew how “Hizzoner” – “Da Boss” – Mayor Richard J. Daley – used to run elections: he knew who he wanted to win, and he’d hold back the numbers until he knew how many he had to steal. My, how things have changed: today in Iowa, the Democrat party bosses held back the numbers because they hadn’t decided who they wanted to win yet. What a switch.
Of course, there is always one more possibility: maybe they’re telling the truth. Maybe today’s Democrats really can’t figure out how to report the results of a caucus they’ve been holding for a century. Maybe they really can’t organize a simple election that every person in every single room saw with their own eyes. Maybe the joke about modern economics – that Democrats can’t understand the economy because they can’t do math – isn’t really a joke after all.
In any case, the lesson from the Iowa caucuses is that Democrats can’t be trusted with their own elections. So why should they be trusted with anything else?
Even without being released, the numbers revealed the truth.
No wonder the Democrats did everything they could to hide them.
Copyright 2020 John F. Di Leo
John F Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer, writer and actor. A minor local political activist in the 1980s and 90s, he retired from activism after serving as Milwaukee County’s Republican county chairman, and has been a “recovering politician” for over 20 years now (but, just like any addiction, you’re never really cured).
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