Two in-depth essays on what the Iowa caucus debacle really means

[MinnesotaSmith]

End Of The American Dream

Life As You Have Known It Will Never Be The Same Again...

endoftheamericandream.com

The Debacle In Iowa Is A Perfect Example Of The Extreme Incompetence That Is Plaguing America
February 4, 2020 by Michael Snyder

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The rest of the world is laughing at us. After what just took place in Iowa, we certainly do not have any right to lecture other nations about how to run their elections. It was a dumpster fire of epic proportions, and the entire globe is talking about it. Apparently the Democrats have decided to run their elections the same way that they run their cities. The Iowa Democratic Party had just one job to do, and they failed in spectacular fashion. Collecting voting results and reporting them to the public shouldn’t be complicated, but these days incompetence has become the norm. From one end of the country to the other it seems like people are competing to see who can be the most incompetent, and our population is becoming more “dumbed down” with each passing day.

The debacle in Iowa is being blamed on a faulty app, and I suppose that we shouldn’t be surprised.

After all, just about everything that we put on our phones and computers these days must be constantly “fixed” or “patched” due to endless errors.

This app that the Democrats were using did not have to be complicated. It simply needed to accurately relay data from the precincts to the Iowa Democratic Party, but thanks to “a coding error” that did not happen…

Due to a coding error, the app, created by a company called Shadow Inc., wasn’t reporting the correct data, according to the Iowa Democratic Party. The error resulted in the Democrats delaying all public reporting of the results of Monday’s caucuses, and has sown chaos and confusion in a hotly contested and deeply important primary.

After all of the hot air that the Democrats have been blowing around about “the integrity of our elections”, you would think that they would have their act together for the 2020 election.

But instead they just showed the rest of the world what not to do.

And it isn’t as if this was a complete surprise. According to CNN, it was clear well in advance that the app “was not working properly”…

Precinct captains from across Iowa began realizing days before the caucuses that the app was not working properly. Some complained to their county party leadership, others said nothing and hoped it would work at the needed moment and some just planned to call in their results, as has been done in the past. And most county party chairs openly worried about the lack of training on the reporting system.

In fact, only about one-fourth of all precinct chairs were able to successfully download the app…

Only a quarter of nearly 1,700 precinct chairs even successfully downloaded the app, according to a Democrat familiar with the matter.
“I couldn’t get it to work,” said Jane Podgorniak, the Worth County party chair. “I tried and tried.”

There never was any training for the precinct chairs, and there was mass confusion among local party officials. In Polk County, the chairman of the Democratic Party told his precinct chairs to simply call in the results, but that didn’t work either. The following comes from the New York Times…

So last Thursday Mr. Bagniewski, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Iowa’s most populous county, Polk, instructed his precinct chairs to simply call in the caucus results as they had always done. But during Monday night’s caucuses, those precinct chairs could not connect with party leaders via phone. Hold times stretched past 90 minutes. And when Mr. Bagniewski had his executive director to take pictures of the results with her smartphone and drive over to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters to deliver them in person she was turned away without explanation.

Some precinct chairs were on hold with headquarters for two or three hours on Monday night, and it is still not clear why Iowa Democratic Party officials were not more responsive.

Needless to say, this was a complete and utter embarrassment for the national Democratic Party, and DNC Chair Tom Perez is pledging that such a debacle will never happen again…

“What happened last night should never happen again,” Perez wrote in the statement. “We have staff working around the clock to assist the Iowa Democratic Party to ensure that all votes are counted. It is clear that the app in question did not function adequately. It will not be used in Nevada or anywhere else during the primary election process. The technology vendor must provide absolute transparent accounting of what went wrong.”

Hopefully they can get their issues ironed out, but the truth is that the Democratic Party has a long history of complete and utter incompetence.

Of course the Republican Party is not much better. In fact, I could tell you stories about Republicans in my area that would make your hair stand on end.

Sadly, the truth is that we have become a raging “idiocracy” where people can’t seem to do much of anything right. At one time we were a shining example to the rest of the world, but today we are a horde of entertainment-addicted zombies that never learned what it means to grow up and act like adults. For example, just consider what is happening at one of our most prestigious universities…

Students at Yale University are being encouraged to participate in a variety of programs offered by the Chaplain’s Office, including a weekly “Cookies and Coloring” hour and a campus “Bouncy Castle” during nice weather.
The children’s activities are promoted as opportunities for adult students to relieve anxiety and disconnect from technology at the Ivy League institution.

The more mindless our entertainment, the more we like it. The number of alcohol-related deaths has doubled over the past 20 years, the suicide rate has soared to a record high, and we are taking more legal and illegal drugs than ever before. And in just about every category of immorality that you can possibly imagine we are either leading the world or we are in very close contention for the top spot. We are a complete and utter mess, and we on a road that inevitably leads to national ruin.

Of course if anyone dares to offend our snowflake sensibilities by confronting us with the truth, many of us instantly melt down and start throwing a temper tantrum.

Needless to say, what I have just said does not apply to everyone. But overall our society is rapidly degenerating all around us, and our nation has no future if we stay on this path."

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[MinnesotaSmith]

Shock: Iowa Caucus Disaster App Not Working in Nevada, Either

Democratic leaders in Nevada have experienced glitches while testing an app made by Shadow Inc., the same company behind the Iowa caucus fiasco, according to a new report.

www.breitbart.com

Shock: Iowa Caucus Disaster App Not Working in Nevada, Either

DAVID NG
7 Feb 7, 2020

"Democratic leaders in Nevada have experienced glitches while testing an app made by Shadow Inc., the same company behind the Iowa caucus fiasco, according to a new report.
Vice News’ Motherboard reported that volunteers in Nevada encountered the errors when trying to submit test caucus results. Motherboard cited an anonymous source and said it also reviewed the app. Democratic officials in Nevada announced earlier this week that they won’t be using the app during the state’s caucus set to take place on February 22.

The tech firm Shadow, Inc. created the malfunctioning app at the center of the Iowa caucuses. A glitch in the software impeded the reporting of caucus results late Monday, creating a major embarrassment for party leaders.

Shadow has direct ties to Democratic party establishment figures and is facing accusations that its leaders are biased against non-establishment candidates, particularly Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

The firm is headed by several former campaign staffers for Hillary Clinton, while he firm’s parent organization — the non-profit group ACRONYM — has ties to Barack Obama and its CEO is reportedly married to Michael Halle, a senior strategist with the Pete Buttigieg campaign.

The Intercept reported earlier this week that ACRONYM leaders regularly made hostile remarks about supporters of Sen. Sanders.

Motherboard said Friday that volunteers in Nevada who used the app were presented with a dashboard letting them submit how many caucus attendees they wished to add for each candidate. A pop-up window then asked, “Are you sure you want to submit the first alignment? Please ensure all in-person participant counts are correct before confirming.”

But submitting the counts for the first alignment did not work, according to Motherboard. “Error,” a second pop-up said. “Could not submit alignment.”

A Shadow spokesperson told Motherboard that “because the deadline for the Nevada app was later, Shadow’s Nevada app was still in beta testing, and that testing identified some errors that were being fixed.”

Shadow also said that the app was on track for a “successful rollout” with the Nevada Democratic Party.

Shadow’s statement appears to contradict what Democratic leaders in Nevada said earlier this week when announcing that they would no longer use the same app or vendor as the Iowa caucus.

“NV Dems can confidently say that what happened in the Iowa caucus last night will not happen in Nevada on February 22nd. We will not be employing the same app or vendor used in the Iowa caucus,” Nevada State Democratic Party Chairman William McCurdy said in a statement.

“We had already developed a series of backups and redundant reporting systems, and are currently evaluating the best path forward.”"

 

[MinnesotaSmith]

Related: “Iowa Caucus: Who Different Groups Supported” [New York Times].

Bernie is REALLY the candidate of class envy (or class war if he gets elected).

 

[MinnesotaSmith]

And, this:

They're Going to Try to Steal California From Sanders (Again) - Truthdig

Given what just unfolded at the Iowa caucuses, not to mention in 2016, voters in the Golden State need to look out on Super Tuesday.

www.truthdig.com

FEB 05, 2020
By Lee Camp
They're Going to Try to Steal California From Sanders (Again)

Shutterstock
"After watching Iowa devolve into chaos like a car crash in slow motion, I regret to inform you that California will be stolen from Bernie Sanders.

It’s happening now, and anyone with a vague understanding of what took place in 2016 should know how the grand theft will go down. But the good news is there’s still a chance to have a legitimate vote in the land of sunshine and broken dreams, which is why the Democratic National Committee probably doesn’t want you to read this column. So if DNC Chair Tom Perez comes around and dumps hot tea in your lap in the next few minutes, you’ll know why. (He has a lot of free time.)

California is one of the biggest prizes, with 495 delegates up for grabs. And it’s even more important this year because its primaries have been moved up to Super Tuesday, March 3. Right now, Bernie Sanders, aka “Old Man Rational,” has jumped to the top of the California polls. So if you were the ruling elite of California and you wanted to rig your primary against people like Bernie Sanders, what would you do (Short of breaking the legs of anyone who gives change to a homeless man)?

Well, I guess one thing would be to make it really hard for a person to vote if he isn’t a full-on bread-and-butter Joe Biden-loving Democrat who owns a T-shirt featuring Barack Obama riding on a dinosaur. Candidates like Bernie attract a lot of voters who are outside the two corrupt Wall Street parties, i.e. independents. And independents are no small group. In fact 45% of Americans consider themselves Independents, while only 27% call themselves Democrats and 27% Republicans.

So if you’re an independent in California, when you registered to vote, some of you probably checked the box that said “American Independent Party.” There’s only one problem: The American Independent Party is a borderline neo-Nazi group. It’s the name of a party that opposes gay marriage, hates immigrants and apparently hates women, because the last line of its manifesto (of course it has a manifesto) actually states, “In consequence whereof, we call upon all men who value their God-given liberty to join us in pursuit of these political convictions!” (Emphasis added … but you could feel it.)

Can I also add that I strongly believe one can’t just follow racist, sexist crap with the antiquated phrase “in consequence whereof” and think that makes it OK? Rarely do you hear a story like, “The other day someone said to me, ‘In consequence whereof, I consider you a bucket of dicks.” And I responded, ‘Why thank you, my good man. Henceforth and forsooth, go screw yourself.’”
So, do you think a lot of independents in California accidentally sign up for the bigotry party? Yes they do. “A Los Angeles Times investigation has found that a majority of [the American Independent Party’s] members have registered with the party in error. Nearly three out of four people did not realize they had joined the party. …”

Therefore, Californians should be forewarned that if they want to vote for someone outside the centrists — say, Bernie Sanders — they need to change their party affiliation to either Democrat or No Party Preference. But it gets even worse.

In order to stop the “No Party Preference” people from voting, the state (read: the corporate Democratic machine) does not give them a ballot with the presidential choices on it … which is RIDICULOUS! Do they honestly think millions of people skipped work to stand in line at a polling place playing Pokemon on their phones for three hours in order to vote for the City Council’s assistant treasurer?! No! They showed up to tell Joe Biden to check into a retirement home. And there is indeed a way they can vote in the presidential primary, but it’s complicated.

To sum up — millions of California independents are accidentally signed up for a racist, homophobic party. Millions more are handed a ballot without presidential candidates. In consequence whereof — millions of people will not get to cast a vote in the primary. But, as investigative journalist Greg Palast has revealed, it gets even worse! He wrote, “… if an NPP voter asks the poll worker, ‘How do I get to vote in the Democratic party primary?’ the poll workers are instructed to say that, ‘NPP voters can’t get Democratic ballots.'”

The poll workers are not lying … kinda. NPP voters can’t get Democratic ballots, but they can get Democratic crossover ballots, which do include the presidential race. So as Palast explains, “…if you don’t say the magic words, ‘I want a Democratic crossover ballot,’ you are automatically given a ballot without the presidential race.”

You have to say the g*ddamn golden phrase to get to vote?! Poll workers are nearly instructed to lie to Independents unless the voter has the passcode. It is bananas that it’s this hard to obtain the correct ballot in California! (I’ve had an easier time procuring meth in a Mormon household.)
Because of these intentional hurdles designed to stop Independents from voting, millions of Californians will be handed something called a “provisional ballot.”

Let’s see, how do I explain a provisional ballot? You know when a little toddler has a ball and they go to throw it, and they cock their arm back and then the ball rolls out of their hand behind them, and they end up throwing nothing but air? But they think they threw the ball, so you can see them watching for where the ball is going to land? That’s a provisional ballot. It’s a lot of buildup, but you didn’t do shit. Because no one will ever count it.

In truth, a certain percentage of provisional ballots are indeed counted, but by the time they are, it’s too late. The results have been reported, and the provisional ballots are really just an afterthought. For this reason, Palast calls them “placebo ballots” — they’re designed to make you think you voted. So don’t accept a provisional ballot. Demand your right to vote in the presidential primary. Demand a crossover ballot.

Election integrity activists in California also recommend people vote early, which can be done right now, in person, at your county Department of Elections. That way you’ll have plenty of time to deal with what they call in the election integrity biz — f*ckery.

Ironically, our government fights to make sure as few people as possible vote in our elections. Since the mainstream media has been captured by corporate America, only alternative media now reveals how the wealthy and the powerful game the systems.

So tell your sun-bleached Cali friends to demand a real ballot with the presidential candidates on it. I’m not going tell you or them who to vote for, but in consequence whereof the American Independent (Homophobe) Party is fighting for your rights, such as the right to speak like it’s the mid-1800s. (As long as you’re a white male landowner of military age. Immigrants and women need not apply.)"