Clusterfuck

I don't know what else to call it; the Iowa caucus last night was a complete and utter clusterfuck and a monumental disservice to democracy everywhere. The whole caucus process is a joke to begin with, even if it runs smoothly it's an affront to what democracy is supposed to be, but when it's mishandled and mismanaged like it was last night, it becomes nightmarish clusterfuck.

_{source: CNN}

For non Americans and Americans who don't know how a caucus actually works, here's the tldr; every precinct, of which there are 1681 in Iowa state, has a meeting where representatives of all running candidates meet up with their voters and try to lure in more voters. This is a completely open process, nothing like a secret or anonymous ballot, which is problematic in itself; say your boss is there with you, not everyone is comfortable with openly showing their political and ideological choice. Anyhow, all these voters get counted for what's called the "first alignment". Now, that should be the end of it, this is the popular vote, the thing democracy was designed to do.

But it's not the end of it; now comes the "final alignment." To be viable for delegates at all, and the ultimate winner is the one with the most delegates, not the most votes, a candidate needs to score at least 15% of the vote in the particular precinct. In the second round, all voters who backed a candidate who didn't reach that minimum of 15%, can choose to align another candidate or go home, this is where deals are made and coins are flipped. I've watched live streams all night and this is true: on several occasions candidates' backers made packs to reach the minimum threshold and sometimes a coin was flipped to decide where the last vote went to decide the delegate distribution, and in a pack of several candidates, a name was literally pulled out of a hat to decide which one received the votes and delegates. There were a story of a father who called out to his son to come join him... Really, if we saw such a process in a failed third world state, we would call it rigged. A similar construction made it possible that in the 2016 general elections Trump could win when Clinton had 3 million more votes, Clinton had 48.2% of the popular vote against 46.1% for Trump, yet Trump got 306 electoral votes against 232 for Clinton.

Yeah yeah, I know: "We're a Republic, not a democracy." The last part is true; this is not a democracy, but it's business as usual in America: Trump is the fifth person in U.S. history to become president while losing the nationwide popular vote. But this is how it works when everything goes as it's supposed to; last night nothing went as it's supposed to however when it came to count the votes, and here it becomes ugly. Let me start by saying that as of now there's no proof whatsoever for foul play of any kind; it seems to be incompetence on a scale not previously experienced. But... Okay let's get through this fiasco...

_{Bernie’s Philosophy On Life Is One We Can All Relate To}

The Iowa Democratic party decided to, for the first time, publish all three counts: the fist alignment, the final alignment and the delegate count. During all the coverage someone mentioned that in this system we could have the surreal situation that one candidate wins the first alignment, the popular vote, another candidate wins the final alignment, and yet another candidate receives the most delegates. And that's true, even when such a scenario would be a democratic clusterfuck of its own. To help with this unprecedented transparency of publishing all counts, an online app was used, but when the updates to the count stopped when only 2% of the results were processed, the macabre hilarity began; first it was reported that the count was delayed because the DNC wanted to do "quality control" to make sure they publish the correct numbers. When results still didn't come in it was reported that it was actually the app; they found a coding error after "irregular" results started popping up.

Iowa, to my knowledge, only has 41 delegates, out of a 4,000 plus total for the nation; the delegates are not the reason why the Iowa primary is considered so important. No, it's the press coverage and the momentum it lends the winner in the following primaries. Whoever the winner is, there's still no final result I can give you, he or she has been robbed of this advantage. And during the caucus all signs were that Bernie and Pete Buttigieg were both doing very well, with Pete being the surprise of the two. Right now, as I'm writing this, 62% of the official vote-count is in with Bernie winning the popular vote convincingly, and after final alignment Sanders still has a slight lead, yet Buttigieg gets the highest percentage of delegates. One site has both Pete and Bernie on 10 delegates.

There's all sorts of reports going around, but many focus on the app and its financiers; Pete's campaign as well as a Democratic super-pack are mentioned as having payed for the app. Think about this: say Trump pays for the app that's used for the general elections... Who would accept that? This is a huge conflict of interests at best. This is the kind of fraudulence you'd expect from a banana republic, not the country that's supposed to be the world's premier democracy. On top of all this, a couple of corporate backed candidates, namely Klobuchar and Buttigieg, used this "fog of war" to turn the narrative in their favor; they both gave speeches that could be considered victory-speeches. Many pundits, even the progressives online, reacted by saying how smart a move that was; it's astounding to me how deep the acceptance of this kind of hawkish opportunism goes to be honest. Yes, it could very well be the politically expedient thing to do, just proclaim you're the winner to catch the headlines next morning when we're still be waiting for the results, but that doesn't make it right. Sanders only said that he's confident that his campaign did very well in Iowa, which is the right and honest thing to do. Democracy only works when we're honest people...

When all's said and done though, both results are good for Bernie, even when Pete narrowly wins. This is because Bernie has a crushing lead in the polls in New Hampshire, the next round, and Buttigieg has no realistic chance to become the nominee as he stands on 4 or 5% in the national polls. What's frustrating though is that all seems to be going against the leading progressive candidate again, as always. I don't blame anyone who feels this fiasco was by design. At the press conference where the official results were announced, the first question shouted at the stage was: "how can we trust you now?" Indeed, how can we? Well, I promised to come back to this, so it's kind of disappointing that I can't include the final results here... Two videos today: the first is a reminder of why this is not the time to give up and why Bernie Sanders is the best candidate, a once in a lifetime candidate even. The second is the first reaction of Bernie supporters at The Young Turks when news about the app and its background broke; I felt the same at the time, I must admit.

_{Biden INSISTING He Needs To Review Iowa Results Before DNC Releases Them}

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