I heard that from other people - that people whose candidate wasn’t viable went home instead of moving during re-alignment.
Wouldn’t surprise me from the Yang people, they’re a unique cult.
Didn’t even know there were Steyer supporters
Sanders campaign reportedly about to release their internal calculations of the result.
A bunch of us did a road trip to Iowa to see how messy democracy could be.
But it wasn’t, on the local level. We hit a small town tavern and found a surprisingly big group of Iowans wearing PETE gear, big Biden and Sanders camps, Warren and Klobuchar finally got enough to “be viable”… after the Steyer folks gave up and joined Amy’s group.
And the one old lady with a hand-scrawled Yang sign joined her daughter in the Warren corner.
But my god, the people were great! The Impeachment “Trial” had sapped my belief in people, tonight restored it. Each group gave speeches and tried to get recruits… so much passion for the ideals this country was founded on.
Here are his results:
Sanders 29.66%
Pete 24.59%
Warren 21.24%
Biden 12.37%
These are the calculations from the Sanders campaign. Not official.
Whoever wins won’t get any sort of bump. There will be no address to the cheering supporters or anything of the sort because of this vote counting debacle. I understand that there were app problems, but they could have had a messenger boy carry them to headquarters by this time.
Cue my simmering anger that a goofy system in Iowa has so much power over the rest of the country.
I also wonder if there weren’t some caucus sites that totally screwed up the realignment process. In the past, all of this error and intrigue happened internally within the precinct, but the new transparency means that the whole sausage-making process is on display.
Whoa. If those are even close to accurate, that’s awesome. Per Nate Silver, that result gives Bernie a 64% chance of winning the nomination.
I’m going to take a tentative victory shot and go to bed.
Informal reports seem to suggest this was a good night for Bernie/Pete and a bad one for Biden in which case this mess will benefit them in reverse order by throwing confusion on the whole caucus. If the real numbers are anything like those internal calculations, Biden dodged a huge bullet.
It also represents a huge failure for the Democratic party particularly in Iowa. Reporting the results of a caucus is a simple task. If some new app was being tried, it should have been thoroughly tested and there should also have been a foolproof backup in place.
The whole Iowa caucus is a nutty system anyway and if this disaster leads to it being scrapped or heavily modified I suppose something good would have come out of it.
MSNBC running Yang’s speech on tape now. “The Yang Gang has shocked the world so many times before!”
Um…when was that again?
If I understand correctly, the process remains the same, it is just that the poll workers are taking a count on the first round of voting, no?
IOW, it’s a two step process. There are speeches and then a vote* is taken. Any candidate who doesn’t get 15% of the precinct vote is cut and that candidate’s voters, after another round of speeches, can join another candidate’s group or go home.
That’s the same as it has always been expect the Dems this year wanted to get a count of the first raw vote.
Even with an app failure, it should seem trivially easy to send a bunch of emails to the county clerk.
*Not a secret ballot, but the voters actually stand together.
When it comes to counting votes, there’s never any need for anything more high-tech than simple paper ballots. Never.
Stupid technocratic cunts and their pointless fucking apps. I hope they die in a car fire.
Also, this farce really puts Trump’s brain farts into perspective, doesn’t it? I mean, what’s worse, not knowing where Kansas City is, or making a total fuck up off the first caucus of the year?
If I were the conspiracy type, and I’m not, I’d suspicious that this whole debacle was a way of blunting Bernie’s momentum.
“How can you vote for Trump? He’s a complete moron” would be a powerful argument if it couldn’t so easily be countered with “How can you vote for a Democrat? They can’t even organise a piss-up in a brewery”
No, the process was changed in at least one way (banning supporters of viable candidates from re-aligning, and thus allowing them to go home sooner). I’ve seen some (obviously anecdotal and unverified) reports that one of the issues is that if people left between the first and second rounds, having supported a viable candidate, they weren’t being counted in the second round, even though they should be under the new rules.
Also, the process was opaque and byzantine before this year, it’s just that there were no receipts to prove that people didn’t know WTF they were doing. AFAIK, the precinct called in the “delegate equivalents” to the state party, and that was that. Now they’re sending in all the numbers, and those could conceivably be obviously wrong (for instance, if the number of supporters for a viable candidate went down between rounds, or if a candidate was non-viable but still got a delegate). (But thankfully there are now some written ballot-like papers that could be used to approximate a recount, I guess.)
You only had one job …
Seriously Iowa is in the public eye once every four years and they managed to mess it up. This is almost certainly just a stupid screwup, but it does show us how shaky out voting systems are. “It makes you think.”
(NM, double-post)
CNN had a live feed from Drake University, and they sent an “Undecided” delegate because a group of Booker supporters weren’t budging.