Note: This was going to be a footnote but I decided to put it first. Yesterday I asked the guy who is going to have the unenviable job of convening our town caucus and who has a meeting where they're going to tell them what the latest lousy innovations are for this cycle, who in the Maine Democratic Party are stupid enough to think that caucuses should be kept. He said there were people who claimed that they're necessary for organizing the party. I pointed out to him something he certainly knew, they are totally ineffective for building the party on a local level. They are more likely to divide the party and to lead to disillusionment, resentment and accusations of corruption by idiots who are prone to make their lives more exciting by inventing dark conspiracies. Those are mostly the Bernie Bots this time as last, but it will be some other temporary cult some other time.
Abolishing the caucuses nation-wide is a necessary step to election reform. States who have primaries and a far less screw-ball and counter-productive and entirely more democratic system have as much of a stake in getting rid of them as people who live in states, such as mine, where idiots who want to keep them can force us to. We should all pressure the DNC to adopt rules against delegates assigned through caucuses and the state conventions of states with caucuses from having a vote at the national convention. Adding a state-convention is an added corruption in the system that is little discussed but it makes the caucus system even worse than I've talked about here. For a start, delegates chosen through caucuses have such a way of not turning up at the state convention they committed themselves to going to and what they do there is subject to even more arbitrary and whimsical change made all on their own. It is all entirely stupid and anti-democratic.
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I will be very surprised if the Nevada Caucus, in about two and a half weeks is any less a chaotic disaster than Iowa was. And that's just the beginning of caucus chaos. I'm hoping they don't use an app that can be traced by rumor mongering, conspiracy divining play-lefty podcasters like Cenk and Ana and Sam and Michael to Pete Buttigieg or the Clintons.
Let's stipulate that it was STUPID for the Iowa Democratic Party to have commissioned an app to put their hopes in, was stupid to start with. To have waited till November to order it - too late for one to get the bugs out and to be fully tested on a statewide level was even stupider. But to order one which could be associated with the Clinton campaign and Maypr Pete, the newest paranoid fixations of the Bernie Sanders cult was unbelievably stupid and, in itself, should disqualify those who made the decision from having such responsibilities forever more.
Considering the fact that we know that the Putin crime gang and its associates in American and British billionaire financed ratfucking are using the internet to do their ratfucking of Democrats on behalf of their allies in the Republican-fascist party, Democrats depending on the internet for anything to do with elections is even more disqualifyingly stupid than any of it. They've only had four years to understand that problem, yet they're still doing the same stupid stuff John Podesta more innocently did back then. Speaking of Podesta, with his associations to dodgy stuff through his brother, why is he still a power in the Democratic Party?
But it was hardly all about the app, it's hardly just Iowa but Iowa wanted the benefits of being first so let's use them as an example of how caucuses are always, everywhere and entirely a screwed up system open to corruption and inviting paranoia to run wild. This description of how just some of the worst of the Iowa disaster happened lays out how caucuses are and always have been a recipe for a fiasco. But first you have to understand that the rules almost always change from cycle to cycle because there are always huge screw ups with caucuses and instead of getting rid of them, they try to patch them.
Why Iowa Democrats changed their rules
In past Iowa Democratic caucuses, the state party never actually recorded or reported the number of attendees who supported each presidential candidate.
Instead, Democrats reported their results in terms of “state delegate equivalents.” Basically, each precinct caucus culminates in the allotment of county convention delegates to each candidate. The precinct chair would report those county delegate results to the state party. They’d look something like: 2 delegates for Candidate A, 1 for Candidate B.
The state party would then calculated an estimate of how many state delegates to which those results corresponded. The weighting depends on how much each county voted for the last Democratic presidential and gubernatorial candidate. So that result could look something like: .06 of a state delegate equivalent for Candidate A, .03 for Candidate B.
Compare and contrast basing that decision on a state-wide ballot as should happen in a primary election where you don't have or shouldn't have inequalities cooked into it. Inequality is inexcusable in any election, weighting rural districts differently than urban districts, one area as opposed to another is not only complex and stupid, IT IS CORRUPT.
So when Barack Obama “won” the Iowa caucuses with 37.6 percent in 2008, that meant he won 37.6 percent of state delegate equivalents (940 of them, in total). And when Hillary Clinton “beat” Sanders 49.84 percent to 49.59 percent in the 2016 caucuses, those percentages were also of state delegate equivalents, not votes. Nobody knew how many actual votes each candidate got.
This practice proved to be controversial after Sanders’s narrow defeat in 2016. Sanders suspected he would have won in a “popular” vote of Iowa, if there was one (due to bigger turnout in college towns and other areas that wouldn’t be reflected in the delegate calculations).
“Did we win the popular vote? I don’t know, but as much information as possible should be made available,” Sanders said at the time.
I will break in again to point out that Sanders' demand to know what the popular vote was is clearly justifiable but, considering his own dependence on the caucuses as opposed to the primaries for his "victories" it is hypocritical. I will point you, again to Washington state which had a binding caucus which Bernie Sanders won - WITH A FRACTION OF THE PARTICIPATION of the non-binding Washington state prmary which Bernie Sanders lost BASED ON A FAR LARGER POPULAR VOTE!
Also that year, several claims of miscounted results spread on social media and in the press — many from Sanders supporters, who were complaining that Bernie did better in their precincts than the county delegate results reflected. And the problem was, no paper trail existed that could prove or disprove their accounts.
Oh, well, if you think that would have mattered to them. Maine instituted a paper trail for the first time in its caucus in 2016, I remember asking the convener of the caucus "what's this about" as we were given papers to mark our preference on at the start of the caucus - IN EFFECT MARKING A BALLOT AS WE WOULD HAVE IN A PRIMARY. I also remember asking why we were going through the idiotic caucus process if all that needed to be done was to count the ballots we'd just marked.
That caucus saw one of our biggest turn outs, ever, and it was at least with a large number of same-day party declarers, many of whom had never been "Democrats" until the day of the caucus, many of whom had never participated in a caucus and some of whom knew "how it's supposed to be done" though they were such neophytes they didn't know that the rules change every single time and always did. I remember being furious with some of the Bernie Bots who muttered darkly against the volunteers running the caucus, accusing them of rigging it for Hillary Clinton WHEN THE PROCESS WAS TAKING PLACE RIGHT BEFORE THEIR IDIOTIC EYES. The Bernie Sanders cult is about as conspiracy prone as that of the late and entirely unlamented Lyndon Larouche's was. Nothing but a coronation of their cult leader will prevent conspiracies being theorized and rumors being mongered. And, I know the type, if he were president, they'd turn on him as soon as those among them decided to have a snit and accuse Bernie of betrayal.
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