The New York Times nails the subtext of my earlier post about the Iowa Democrat Caucuses: without secret ballots, have the caucuses been a fraud this whole time?
An hour after the caucuses began, the Iowa Democratic Party chairman, Troy Price, huddled in another room with other officials, none of them with a clear strategy to manage the unfolding chaos or answers to share with increasingly exasperated presidential campaigns. A conference call with the campaigns ended with Mr. Price hanging up on them, amid accusations that caucus results in Iowa may have been incorrectly reported for decades.As disastrous as the 2020 Iowa caucuses have appeared to the public, the failure runs deeper and wider than has previously been known, according to dozens of interviews with those involved. It was a total system breakdown that casts doubt on how a critical contest on the American political calendar has been managed for years. ...
"You always had to calculate these numbers, all we're asking is that you report them for the first time," Jeff Weaver, Mr. Sanders's closest adviser, said he told Mr. Price on the call. "If you haven't been calculating these numbers all along, it's been a fraud for 100 years."
Mr. Price ended the call.
It's time to end the caucuses. They aren't democratic, and it seems likely that they've been fraudulent since their inception. The new reporting rules simply revealed the errors that have been there all along.
