An Iowa GOP caucus voter who helped count the votes at his small caucus meeting in Moulton, Iowa claims that former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) accidentally received 20 extra votes than he earned — a claim which, if true, would change the winner of the unusually close caucus to former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA):
Edward True, 28, of Moulton, said he helped count the votes and jotted the results down on a piece of paper to post to his Facebook page. He said when he checked to make sure the Republican Party of Iowa got the count right, he said he was shocked to find they hadn’t.“When Mitt Romney won Iowa by eight votes and I’ve got a 20-vote discrepancy here, that right there says Rick Santorum won Iowa,” True said. “Not Mitt Romney.”True said at his 53-person caucus at the Garrett Memorial Library, Romney received two votes. According to the Iowa Republican Party’s website, True’s precinct cast 22 votes for Romney.
Des Moines TV station KCCI 8 captured an image of Moulton’s handwritten vote count:
Minor counting errors such as this one are extremely common on election day, so it is perfectly plausible that Moulton is correct and Romney did receive 20 unearned votes. It is equally plausible, however, that these lost votes could be canceled out by a similar error at another caucus site. The tentative results, which showed Romney with the barest 8 vote lead, have not yet been certified.
Nevertheless, the Iowa GOP does not seem happy that True is questioning the early result. According to KCCI, a spokesperson for the Iowa GOP said that “True is not a precinct captain and he’s not a county chairperson so he has no business talking about election results.”
2 comments:
(1) There are many procedural laxities in our Iowa Republican caucus system. The wizards may want no attention to be cast behind the curtain of Oz, but those of us who are little munchkins at the grassroots level can see as eyewitnesses what is going on. This is particularly true in urban areas when precincts are combined into crowds of hundreds of strangers milling about, and when the ballots are merely blank pieces of colored paper that anyone can easily counterfeit. In 2008, for instance, I saw my own ballot box being stuffed at a combined-precincts caucus by a fellow who tossed in a fistful of bogus ballots before darting away into the crowd. Later my own ballot, from that same ballot box, was physically stolen in the behind-the-scenes sorting room. I know this is true because when I received back my own single precinct's sorted ballots for the counting, my ballot had disappeared. And to crown the 2008 farce, a county leadership official tried to hijack all the counts for Coralville's 6 precincts so that he alone (not the individual precincts) could call the results in to the Republican state headquarters in Des Moines. This year I collected my precinct's ballots without an admixture from other precincts, and verified (in front of 22 witnesses) what the correct count was-- before anything went into the back counting room.
(2) They didn't know their "results" had already been pre-recorded and verified by us in Coralville Precinct 3. So, when their erroneous results were "reported" back to us in Coralville CV-03, the alterations were easy to spot and correct. A few minutes later on caucus night I called in to Des Moines Republican headquarters both the correct and false 2012 results, described as such, and noted today 1-7-12 that they have the correct totals posted on their public Internet spread sheet. Thanks to the 2008 experience it was possible to learn and limit the opportunities for vote hijacking in Coralville in 2012. In order to have tamper-proof voting, it would be desirable to have for the future (a) ballot boxes that are made of transparent plastic, and visibly empty before voting starts. A $5 plastic jar from Wal-Mart would work fine. (b) The lid needs to contain a small slit, so that voters can be witnessed putting in one ballot at a time only. (c) The ballots need to be not blank paper, but rather imprinted with individual precinct identification, and security features against counterfeiting would be a welcome plus.
(d) The ballots need to be collected one precinct to a ballot box, not multiple precincts ludicrously mixed together and then "sorted" in some back room before counting. (e) As soon as the individual precinct does its own voting, the same group of people needs to count and tabulate its own votes out of its own ballot box. For a small precinct everyone can gather around to check for honest counting. For a larger precinct, a lottery or a separate election can provide a dozen or two dozen witnesses to stand around the counting table and make sure the tally is honest. (f) Everyone in the precinct needs a chance to write down their own personal retained record of the witnessed count, and they need a website address so that later the next day or week they can verify their part of the statewide total is correct. (g) To prevent phantom voters from appearing at multiple precincts to make multiple votes, there should be no "quick vote and run" allowed, but rather everyone who votes should be required to start together at 7pm and then sit through the individual precinct's procedural caucus falderal (tedious though it may be), until everyone votes together. At small group gatherings in Ma and Pa Kettle's living room, a lot of the foregoing can be foregone because it applies to situations with anonymous crowds. But even with a small group where everyone knows everyone else, and everyone can see every ballot-handling move that is made out in the open, everyone still needs a chance to get their copy of the caucus tally. And they need a centralized Internet tabulation reference address so that within the next few days they can check up on the reliability of what is posted.
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