Bernie Sanders takes a closer look at Iowa caucus totals

[Omaha Steve]

Source: Omaha World Herald

By Joseph Morton

The Bernie Sanders campaign continued to raise questions Wednesday about the results of Iowa’s Democratic caucuses, while state party officials continued to stand behind them.

Final numbers released by the Iowa Democratic Party on Tuesday morning showed that Hillary Clinton finished with a tiny advantage, but Sanders isn’t ready to concede that he lost.

“Right now we’re going through every precinct and double-checking numbers and we’re doing our due diligence, and the senator wants us to see what we find before we make any decisions moving forward,” Sanders spokeswoman Rania Batrice told The World-Herald.

By their nature, caucuses are chaotic, messy affairs. More than 171,000 Democrats poured into gyms and church basements at nearly 1,700 precincts around the state Monday night. Live video feeds from the caucuses at times showed confusion, yelling and procedural disputes.

FULL story at link.

Read more: http://www.omaha.com/news/iowa/bernie-sanders-takes-a-closer-look-at-iowa-caucus-totals/article_f09f2747-9c4f-5ced-bfe5-582ec7cace52.html

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[dinkytron]

1. I am glad he is verifying. Stakes ae high. Take nothing for granted. Trust no one.

[SoapBox]

3. Ditto!

[AzDar]

6. Ayup.

Kind of frightening and even sad that potential election fraud, no matter the scale, is dismissed as trivial by some... or they use of the ol' 'sour grapes' trope to minimize it. That ain't democracy...

[roguevalley]

32. If Iowa is in the clear, then release the numbers to show it. If they aren't keep

stonewalling. Because they are, I believe the irregularity rumors.

[onehandle]

2. Looking for exact math in a caucus is like looking for a particular drop of water in the ocean.

Smells of desperation.

[ananda]

5. Smells of a guy who won't stand down when faced with possible corruption!

Unlike Gore and Kerry -- I should hope!

[brooklynite]

7. I see - you're accusing the Clinton campaign of corruption?

[Dragonfli]

19. You should look at it as proving the opposite, not supporting an audit of such a clusterfucked

close race leads to the appearance of fear of transparency and perhaps something to hide.

Since Hillary would never corrupt herself with money or placing key allies in vote tallying positions, I expect her similar call for a closer look at this caucus promptly, probably later today.

As we know, she is 100% honest no matter how many times she appears to fib on YouTube (she only appears to be fibbing when contradicting herself on several occasions and the American people can tell, just look at the numbers showing 100% trust in her honesty)

[ViseGrip]

27. Why does the IA party chair, (former Clinton fundraiser) not allow a review! This from democrats!

[Dragonfli]

36. The answer may lie in her vanity licence plate - HRC2016 , my guess anyway /nt

[ViseGrip]

26. Don't have to accuse, CSPAN already reported on corruption with Hillary camp in a caucus

C-SPAN Stream: Clinton Precinct Chair lied about the vote counting in Precinct 43 and it was all caught on camera. self

submitted 2 days ago * by Mathsquatchx4

This was for #43 (I believe) in Des Moines, IA held at Roosevelt High School. It was broadcast live on C-SPAN2.

Final delegate count was Clinton 5, Sanders 4. It was very close. Here is the breakdown:

FIRST VOTE: 215 Sanders 210 Clinton 26 O'Malley 8 Undecided 459 TOTAL

After this, the groups realign and another count was conducted. Sanders's group leads performed a FULL recount of all the supporters in his group. The Clinton team only added the new supporters gained to her original number from the first round of voting. I did not see another recount of the Clinton supporters taking place. It would have been very hard to miss that activity.

SECOND ROUND: 232 Clinton 224 Sanders 456 Total

It was assumed by the chair, Drew Gentsch, that the voter difference was due to a few people that left the building before the second round began. The question is whether there were really 456 total people present for the second round of voting. That was not clear, as Clinton's team did not perform a recount of ALL of the Hillary supporters during the second round of voting. We don't know how many Hillary supporters were in the room. Some of them may have also left the building between rounds.

[JackRiddler]

44. Hey no problem, most of it is totally legal.

What's a bit of fudging on a caucus count, compared to getting both your personal income and your campaign money from Goldman Sachs and other lovable Wall Street banksters, corporate predators and billionaires? Hey, all "viable" campaigns do it, right? Except for one.

The kind of sophistry and smears the Clinton operative/volunteer corps think is part of "playing the game to win" is pretty corrupt too, intellectually anyway. But that's also okay, because it's culturally sanctioned. It's supposed to be normal.

The most difficult corruption to root out, in other words, is the kind you no longer see.

[NowSam]

23. Agree!

there are serious conflicts of interest for the Iowa Dem Chair.

[frylock]

9. We get it. You hate transparency.

yay dems.

[Helen Borg]

10. Not checking...

Would smell of sloppiness.

[blackspade]

13. In what way?

Verification is desperation?

[TwilightGardener]

15. Counting isn't hard. Why do you think it is?

[Omaha Steve]

16. Florida 2000 comes to mind after over 15 years

What was your opinion in 2000 of counting all the votes?

[onehandle]

20. That was an election, not a caucus. nt

[Omaha Steve]

21. For a recount before you are now against (your evolving)

My Star Trek universal translator said it. I didn't.

Every caucus worksheet has the number present and the result. What is so tough? They won't even release the total. Why else do they only say 171,000 participated. Hillary person in charge might be a reason? Or the microsoft app. Microsoft has donated to Hillary.

Too many questions. You have to have transparency.

[onehandle]

22. A coordinated conspiracy between Microsoft, 'Hillary people,' and the caucus designers swung Iowa.

Got it.

[Omaha Steve]

24. Inexperienced chairman like in the CSPAN video

Seems they couldn't count right.

[ViseGrip]

28. If you can't realy on exact results, then you can't call a race of .02 anything othere than a tie.

[snooper2]

35. kind of a bad analogy...you know how many drops of water are in the ocean?

HUGH!



There is about 1.3 x 10^9 billion cubic kilometers of water in the oceans. There are 1.0 × 10^15 cubic centimeters in 1 cubic kilometer. There are 25 drops of water in 1 cubic centimeter.

Multiple those three numbers together, and you get 3.25 × 10^25 drops of water in the oceans.

Hope that helps!
Source(s):
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/SyedQadri.shtml

[rhett o rick]

46. LoL. That argument sounds like desperation. Counting is counting. They have the

data, it's really not that hard, at least for progressives.

[fbc]

4. It's important to make an issue of this now to help prevent future shenanigans

[Helen Borg]

11. YES! Bernie's folks are serious.

Well done.

[jillan]

8. If they don't there will always be an asterisk after 2016 Iowa results.

A family member - a 20something yo woman that is not political called me to ask me what happened in Iowa.

People are questioning this.

And to all those that are questioning Bernie, my response is what if the shoe was on the other foot?
There are too many unanswered questions.

[blackspade]

12. At least the Party released to totals....

I was under the impression that they had refused.

[dreamnightwind]

31. ???

There's no "popular vote" breakdown in the OP, or in the article its article links to, as far as I can tell. I think te Sanders campaign wants the number of people who voted for him, statewide, and the number that voted for Hillary, statewide, among other things. Have you seen this info elsewhere that I have not seen?

[blackspade]

33. Apologies, I misread the article.

Apparently the 'calculated' totals were released, not the raw precinct totals that the formulas could be recalculated from.
That is what the Sanders campaign and the paper were after.
My mistake

[dreamnightwind]

34. No problem, happy to help clarify

[Eric J in MN]

14. The DNC should require all states to have primaries starting in 4 years.

"By their nature, caucuses are chaotic, messy affairs. ...Live video feeds from the caucuses at times showed confusion, yelling and procedural disputes."

Then switch to primaries. Let people vote all day, with their votes counting equally.

[yellowcanine]

17. They should change the rules - have the caucus but then everyone fills out a ballot for the count.

Then there is a paper trail. End of drama. End of story.

[TwilightGardener]

18. Right. Since it's public, each citizen who caucuses should have no problem listing a name or

a number connected to a name for record keeping after the event. I want to make sure when I vote that it didn't go to the wrong person.

[Marty McGraw]

25. It's good that Sander's Campaign

Is taking this head on from the Start. It helps to Focus the peoples eye and attention in subsequential states to corrupt Election Fraud and Tally practices. Startling, and sad to see how many out there are ignorant to this issue.

We see how wonderful things turned out with previous candidates keeping quiet and letting mischievous crap like this slide.

[hopemountain]

41. +++^^^

amen. as voters we have a responsibility to pay attention and not ignore the potential for shenanigans, to investigate, and to not ignore any form of injustice.

at least, this is how i view my responsibility as a participant in our 'democracy'.

[mother earth]

29. It's important to double check on any race this close. It's a tenet of democracy, or why bother.

[Duval]

30. Omaha Steve, great to hear from you. K&R! nt

[Omaha Steve]

43. Well some nasty email from a certain crowd had some sway and changed my mind

But I won't be as active here as I was. I have a new place to play: http://jackpineradicals.org/forumdisplay.php?39-The-Wizard-Room

OS

[Babel_17]

37. Let Iowa Democrats get a blue ribbon panel to look things over ...

and make their recommendations public. If they say "do this", and "do that", the public will want those suggestions to happen. It seems to me like it's recognized that while a caucus has value, it must be able to meet the demands of lots of people attending.

[zappaman]

38. I thought you left?

Welcome back.

[Omaha Steve]

40. Doing double duty

I will be here less than most are used to. Labor and misc, but not near the volume of the past.

Tuesday I was babysitting so I didn't do much of anything that day anywhere.

I had a post here last night I wish I hadn't made.

I do have a new place to play: http://jackpineradicals.org/forumdisplay.php?39-The-Wizard-Room

OS

[NYC Liberal]

39. Piss-poor showing by the Sanders campaign.

Given the demographics of Iowa, Sanders should have won by a landslide. But he couldn't even eke out a win there, so now he's going play sore loser. Really pathetic stuff.

[rhett o rick]

47. Huge win for Sanders. While Clinton is crowing about winning 23 delegates to Sanders 21.

The people will be successful in throwing out the Wealthy 1% and their puppets.

[wordpix]

48. she really did crow at the town hall in NH and I was thinking

"You're crowing when you were up (maybe) by 0.2-0.3%?" That is nothing over which to declare a definite win, especially with coin tosses and the like.

[LiberalElite]

42. Good. No way should he concede. nt

[Little Tich]

45. I think that a recount of the votes is the right thing to do under the circumstances.

It was a close call, and the results should be verified.