2020 Iowa Democratic Caucus

[ItsTommyBitch 12,640]

6 minutes ago, HorusRa2 said:

97% of the vote is now in. We have 50 more precincts to report. Pete's lead with the SDE (State Delegate Equivalents) is down to 3 or .1 of 1%. Bernie still has the popular vote by 5954 votes on the first alignment and by 2518 votes on the final alignment. In other words, if you take all three together you still end up with Bernie/Pete leaving Iowa with the same number of delegates and with Bernie winning the popular vote. 

^ Most likely.

There is the chance that some of these SDEs given in the last few precincts will be of the 1/3rd that are proportionally given to be converted to congressional delegates, so Pete could actually end up with 2-3 more delegates just based on geographics (which is silly electoral college b.s) but I'm hoping for an equal delegate count where it matters.

 

[Bt1 5,213]

NYT published an article saying that the irregularities dont look  like an intentional effort to rig the results and there isnt an apparent bias in favor of Pete and Bernie. 

They are errors that happen with manual counting, except now everyone can see them. 

And then they explain basically that caucuses are a mess. 

Dont know how to link and copy the article from the app, so go and find it. 

[REALITY 80,170]

Even if Pete does "win" Iowa—using quotations because him and Sanders are still tied with the most delegates—it's not like he really has a shot of getting the nomination anyway. He's doing awful with POC and in other primary states, he's doing very mediocre. Bernie, imo, still has the best shot, especially considering Biden did awful  in Iowa. There still might be a chance he—Biden—wins a lot of Super Tuesday states, but even then Bernie is now picking up some momentum in those states. 

[ItsTommyBitch 12,640]

22 minutes ago, Florin said:

NYT published an article saying that the irregularities dont look  like an intentional effort to rig the results and there isnt an apparent bias in favor of Pete and Bernie. 

They are errors that happen with manual counting, except now everyone can see them. 

And then they explain basically that caucuses are a mess. 

Dont know how to link and copy the article from the app, so go and find it. 

The NYT wouldn't know what intent is if it hit them in the face to be frank, their judgment is mostly wack.

Not saying that intent is there (though the semblance of it certainly exists when you have members of the DNC connected to the app who have openly stated they will try to stop Sanders from winning lol) 

but they have been absolutely abyssmal at covering much of this primary, and even the writer who pointed out the first mistake of giving accidental delegates to Patrick and Steyer... was calling Bernie people conspiracy theorists on twitter, even though he noticed the same mistake as them  

[ItsTommyBitch 12,640]

I tried to read the NYT article, but this paywall is KILLING me  Can someone post it in a thread or quote it or something? 

I get that they looked at more and more errors, but we will see how it all pans out in the end.

(To my previous comment though, my point is that even if there was clear evidence of intent, the NYT isn't the publication in 2020 that I would expect to go out and say it, they are pretty conservative about those kinds of things)

[HorusRa2 5,005]

3 minutes ago, ItsTommyBitch said:

I tried to read the NYT article, but this paywall is KILLING me  Can someone post it in a thread or quote it or something? 

I get that they looked at more and more errors, but we will see how it all pans out in the end.

(To my previous comment though, my point is that even if there was clear evidence of intent, the NYT isn't the publication in 2020 that I would expect to go out and say it, they are pretty conservative about those kinds of things)

The format is horrendous but best I can do because paywall. 

Many Errors Are Evident in Iowa Caucus Results Released Wednesday

Vote counts are riddled with inconsistencies, though there is no evidence that the mistakes were intentional.

·         Feb. 6, 2020Updated 10:59 a.m. ET

 

Image

A precinct worker tallied Iowa Democratic caucus votes on Monday at West Des Moines Christian Church.Credit...Jim Bourg/Reuters

This article is by Nate Cohn, Andrew Fischer, Josh Katz, Denise Lu, Charlie Smart and Ben Smithgall.

Results from the Iowa Democratic caucuses were delayed by “quality control checks” on Monday night. Days later, quality control issues have not been resolved.

The results released by the Iowa Democratic Party on Wednesday were riddled with inconsistencies and other flaws. According to a New York Times analysis, more than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, that were missing data or that were not possible under the complex rules of the Iowa caucuses.

In some cases, vote tallies do not add up. In others, precincts are shown allotting the wrong number of delegates to certain candidates. And in at least a few cases, the Iowa Democratic Party’s reported results do not match those reported by the precincts.

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Some of these inconsistencies may prove to be innocuous, and the irregularities do not indicate an intentional effort to compromise or rig the result. There is no apparent bias in favor of the leaders Pete Buttigieg or Bernie Sanders, meaning the overall effect on the winner’s margin may be small.

But not all of the errors are minor, and they raise questions about whether the public will ever get a completely precise account of the Iowa results. With Mr. Sanders closing to within 0.1 percentage points with 97 percent of 1,765 precincts reporting, the race could easily grow close enough for even the most minor errors to delay a final projection or raise doubts about a declared winner.

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The errors suggest that many Iowa caucus leaders struggled to follow the rules of their party’s caucuses, or to adopt the additional reporting requirements introduced since 2016. They show that the Iowa Democratic Party, despite the long delays, failed to validate all of the results fully before releasing them to the public.

Mandy McClure, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Democratic Party (I.D.P.), said the party reported the data as provided to it by the precinct caucuses.

“The caucus math work sheet is the official report on caucus night to the I.D.P., and the I.D.P. reports the results as delivered by the precinct chair,” she said. “This form must be signed by the caucus chair, the caucus secretary and representatives from each campaign in the room who attest to its accuracy. Under the rules of the delegate selection process, delegates are awarded based off the record of results as provided by each precinct caucus chair.”

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Just about every election night includes reporting errors. They can be difficult to identify, but can often be corrected during a recount or a postelection canvass. This year’s Iowa caucuses are the reverse: Errors are now easy to identify, and hard to correct.

The errors are detectable because of changes to the way the Iowa Democratic Party reports its results, put in place after the Sanders campaign criticized the caucus results in 2016. This cycle, and for the first time, the party released three sets of results corresponding to different steps in the caucus process. The rules are complex and thorough, and they create conditions in which the results can be obviously inaccurate or inconsistent within a precinct.

First, caucusgoers express their preference for a candidate upon arrival, and these votes are recorded in a “first alignment.” Then, candidates with limited support at a precinct, usually less than 15 percent, are deemed not viable; their supporters get a chance to realign to support a viable candidate. The preference at this point is recorded as well, and it’s called the final alignment.

Viable candidates can’t lose support on realignment, but there were more than 10 cases where a viable candidate lost vote share in the final alignment, even though that is precluded by the caucus rules.

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No new voters are permitted to join the caucus after the first alignment. But in at least 70 precincts, more than 4 percent of the total, there are more tabulated total votes on final alignment than on first alignment.

Many of these cases could be simple tabulation mistakes in a precinct caucus that otherwise went smoothly, like a West Des Moines precinct that reported the first alignment results only for the “nonviable” candidates (those who didn’t meet the 15 percent threshold) but still reported final alignment results for the viable ones. Others appear to be more serious.

At the next step in the process, each precinct allots county delegates based on final preference, and these county delegates are reported to the news media as “state delegate equivalents,” which approximate the number of delegates won at the state convention. Each precinct caucus gets a set number, but a handful of precincts allotted more state delegate equivalents than they had available.

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Notably, there are dozens of precincts where there is a discrepancy between the final preference vote and the number of state delegate equivalents allotted. This includes more than 15 cases in which a candidate received fewer state delegate equivalents than another despite receiving more votes in the final alignment.

Problems With Delegate Allocations

In multiple precincts, the candidate who received the most votes did not receive the most state delegate equivalents. Here is an example of how those differed in Cedar Township in Johnson County.

First Alignment

Votes

Final Alignment

Votes

S.D.E.

Klobuchar

15

22

0.405

Sanders

20

28

0

Buttigieg

12

12

0

Warren

12

0

0

Biden

5

3

0

Bennet

1

0

0

By The New York Times

In these cases, it is not obvious whether the state delegates or the final alignment results were reported inaccurately.

The Iowa Democratic Party has corrected some errors, but the errors became far more frequent on Wednesday as the count dragged on.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Iowa Democratic Party released a wave of results showing Deval Patrick sweeping central Des Moines. That was incorrect. Mr. Sanders’s votes had been reported as being for Mr. Patrick, while Elizabeth Warren’s tallies went to Tom Steyer.

A plausible explanation is that an Iowa Democratic Party staff member accidentally copied the results of one column too far to the left in a spreadsheet for some precincts. Such errors inevitably occur in manual data entry, but the Iowa Democratic Party does not appear to have enough quality checks to assure that it reports accurate results.

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The Iowa Democratic Party quickly corrected these errors, and they are not included in our overall count of discrepancies in more than 100 precincts. The party has not yet addressed other irregularities reported to it or circulating on social media. In another case, The Times alerted the party to an error at 6 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday that remained in the data released several hours later.

Problems With Alignment Counts

In some precincts, viable candidates lost votes in the final alignment, something that the rules preclude. In Indianola’s Second Precinct in Warren County, some votes appeared to be transposed in the Iowa Democratic Party’s reported results.

First

Alignment

Votes

Final

Alignment

Votes

S.D.E.

Buttigieg

50

56

0.7

Warren

0

51

0.4667

Sanders

0

44

0.4667

Klobuchar

30

39

0.4667

Steyer

50

0

0

Patrick

41

0

0

Biden

25

0

0

Uncommitted

2

0

0

Gabbard

1

0

0

[ItsTommyBitch 12,640]

That was messy, and maybe you should put it in quotes @HorusRa2 but it seems the NYT did take note of many of the issues that those "conspiracy bros on twitter" pointed out Idk why Nate Cohn is so arrogant about things though  He's a mess on twitter.

There were blatant errors, including the ones we pointed out here (wrong SDE designation, signs of coin flips that didn't match when you were supposed to do them, just simply incorrect data entry into the wrong columns, no communication from the IDP and DNC with the precinct leaders and supervisors who had tried to report mistakes, etc.)

I'm gonna need everyone who was like "wow isnt this bernie's fault for making this happen" to issue an apology, because if they had not worked to get the three vote totals we would have NEVER known about these errors, and this calls into question the results of every caucus before this.

It's almost like... transparency is a good thing and institutional corruption (from the DNC down) is undemocratic by nature, and it is a worthy fight to have  

[Morphine Prince 109,683]

Oop

[Morphine Prince 109,683]

 

[HorusRa2 5,005]

https://twitter.com/TomPerez/status/1225468833458245632?s=20

 

DNC chair is calling for a recanvass or basically a recount. 

[Morphine Prince 109,683]

THE TIMING 

God, these people are so predictable.

[Othon 34,299]

Just now, Morphine Prince said:

THE TIMING 

God, these people are so predictable.

Right when Bernie’s about to pull ahead... suddenly we need to recanvass. Not a word about all of the “errors” benefiting Buttigieg and harming Sanders.

It’s like they’re actively trying to split their base and elect Trump again. 

[ItsTommyBitch 12,640]

Tom Perez can **** off, I'm sorry  

I just can't trust Tom Perez. He basically stole his chair and has acted w.o conferring with his peers and board on several occassions in pretty authoritarian ways (including just recently deciding to allow Bloomberg to debate - he told no one, he just announced it). Obama made a huge mistake in letting him win that election, AND there's reports that hes kind of tyrannically in favor of allowing corruption and conflicts of interests to continue to play a role in the DNC. He needs to be GONE. We are going to lose this election if we keep playing with fire like this.

The damage is done here, and I don't see a recanvassing as being practical or helpful. Even with some errors, we know the extent of them, and we know that trends will not vastly change. Joe Biden LOST. 

[HorusRa2 5,005]

https://twitter.com/jeffzeleny/status/1225472426894647296?s=20

 

This is probably the biggest debacle since the florida recount. 

[Morphine Prince 109,683]

They should have called a recount that same night and then publish the reviewed results. 

What’s interesting is didn’t they say they reviewed these results multiple times? Isn’t that why it’s taking so long?

And yet there were CLEAR inconsistencies that HAD to be called out to be fixed? 

Come on.