A. It's a caucus, caucuses are always anti-democratic, baroque and ALWAYS broke. I have never participated in one, observed or read about one that was run under simple, rational rules and I have never known of one that wasn't a friggin' mess.
B. They've had years and years to fix problems with the caucus and all they've done is make it worse - God knows what the rules in states who have had even more disastrous caucuses in 2016 are going to be this time.
C. The fucking idiots PUT THEIR HOPES ON AN APP?
AN APP!
Iowa didn't prove that they are incompetent to run a caucus last night, not to mention the absurd idea of giving a single state the status the brite-boy Bender thought was such a nifty idea, THEY PROVED THAT CAUCUSES ARE A TERRIBLE IDEA THAT SHOULD HAVE DIED C 1890.
And they also, once again, prove the idiocy of letting the internet in any form, in any way into the election process. Geeks should be for internal, off line clerical purposes, only. No communication should be done through computers unless it is through unbreakable encryption. Too many idiots have left computers computer based information in places it can be stolen to rely on them.
The actual vote should be in a primary designed to have the greatest turnout, with paper ballots marked by hand and counted at least twice, once by machine or humans, once again by humans, the ballots reviewed if there is a discrepancy but kept until they are moot due to the deaths of all involved.
The retention of caucuses is a sign that states, state parties and politicians who retain them have an insufficent devotion to honest democratic government. They should be considered discredited by their insistence on retaining anti-democratic voting systems. They should be banned from having any authority over them.
Update: Ha! As I was going back to edit this, the internet here suddenly went down.
I understand the turnout was about 170,000. No increase from 2016, probably because how many young people have the time/interest to caucus all night?
ReplyDeleteOTOH, I find the whole thing hilarious. Why does Iowa remain so sacrosanct in this process?
Oh, come on, if they got rid of Iowa's FITN status Morning Edition would have to come up with some gimmick to avoid reporting. What would all of those Iowans do if they showed up to the coffee shop and there were no reporter? They might have to read a newspaper.
DeleteThere is something really annoyingly condescending about that coffee shop coprophage-reportage. It's like a really arrogant white anthropologist descending into an alien culture to explain them to the world by interviewing .02% of the population.