The result of the caucus was a difference of “less than two-tenths of 1 percent” between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. People physically aligned in groups.
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In a scathing editorial, the Des Moines Register decries the outcome of Monday’s Democratic caucus in a piece headlined, “Something smells”.
Reports of polling misconduct were rampant after Monday’s caucus, with stories of precinct caucus chairs proceeding with incorrect counts and some precincts with voters but no one to lead the caucus.
“What happened Monday night at the Democratic caucuses was a debacle, period”, the editorial board wrote, adding that “the refusal to undergo scrutiny or allow for an appeal reeks of autocracy”.
“There are no paper ballots to recount”.
“The Iowa Democratic Caucuses are not a primary-they are the first step in a representative delegate selection process”.
In Monday’s 2016 Iowa Democratic Caucus, one of the Jasper County precincts used a coin flip to settle a delegate tie.
The paper calls on Andy McGuire, chairwoman of the Iowa Democratic Party, to increase caucus transparency. “This is not the biggest deal in the world”. Her actions only confirm the suspicions, wild as they might be, of Sanders supporters.
The bottom line is that the Register is asking Iowa Democrats to turn over a lot of rocks from beneath which a lot of things that will not reflect well on Iowa will crawl out, and without necessarily resolving the question of who really won.
According to the Hill, while Sanders’ campaign has called on the party to release the raw vote totals at each precinct and has accused the party of “failing to staff precincts with independent staffers”, the Register is also “calling for a full audit, which would include a release of raw vote totals, the results of coin tosses, and more information”.
“Iowans who have committed countless hours to these campaigns deserve to have all of the facts”, Sanders spokeswoman Symone Sanders said in an emailed statement. “We can take ribbing over our quirky process”.
Matt Paul, Clinton’s Iowa campaign director, downplayed the situation in a statement.
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There have been questions raised about the Democratic Party’s bias toward Clinton from the start; after all, Sanders has only recently identified himself as a Democrat. Then, more than two weeks later and after a final accounting of most of the paperwork, Santorum was declared the victor by a 34-vote margin out of more than 120,000 cast. After the recount, eight precincts’ votes remained missing.
