Kevin Dujan at Hillbuzz
witnessed blatant in-your-face corruption at the Iowa caucus he attended. This is eye-opening:
In 2008, I worked a Caucus site in Dubuque, Iowa for Hillary Clinton’s campaign — where I saw firsthand just how terrible a Caucus is and how easy it is for voter fraud and intimidation, election tampering, and other nefarious acts to occur in what is the only-slightly-contained chaos of a Caucus. With the Iowa Caucuses set to convene tonight across the Hawkeye State, you’ll be hearing many in the lazy, agenda-driven media spouting all sorts of drivel about how glorious the Caucus system is and how “unique” and “special” it remains; don’t believe a word of that claptrap. Very few of the talking heads and reporters who will praise the Caucuses tonight have ever actually been to one and seen how disorganized, rife with fraud, and ridiculous Iowa’s voting system is.
Four years ago to the day, my friends and I from Team Hillary here in Chicago were stationed in Dubuque, Iowa and operating out of a small Hillary for President office in a shopping mall. On Caucus Day, we spent the entire morning and afternoon canvassing neighborhoods for Hillary around a Caucus location setup in some sort of recreation center adjacent to another crumbling mall (whose anchor department stores had long ago fled). We spent a good portion of the day checking in with elderly Hillary voters to make sure they could attend the Caucus that evening and helped make transportation arrangements for as many of these people as possible so they could vote for Hillary in the Caucus.
It is both staggering and sickening just how many people are disenfranchised by the Caucus system. Unlike primaries — which allow people to cast their votes any time throughout the day, or even over numerous Early Voting days — to be able to cast a vote in a Caucus a person MUST be present during the entire Caucus, which lasted from 6pm – 10pm or so. People who work second and third shift jobs were not able to vote in the Caucus because they needed to be at work or on their way to work at that time. Parents with small children who did not have babysitters could not participate in the Caucus, because they could not bring their children to a Caucus site and subject them to the hours of sitting around the Caucus requires. Elderly people who could not sit on hard metal folding chairs or stand around in tightly packed corners of a rec center could not participate in the Caucus because of the physical strain all those hours worth of “caucusing” takes on them.
It is the most ridiculous, inane, and unfair system for picking a presidential nominee imaginable. The only reason Caucuses exist is because they are so cheap to produce. The political parties in states with primaries need to pay poll workers to run polling stations, including all the early voting days. In Illinois, poll workers make as much as $200 a day. Multiply that by the number of poll workers required to run polling centers in the entire state for as many as 14 days and it adds up to a lot of money the state political parties don’t want to pay out in places like Iowa.
The poll workers at the Iowa Caucus I attended in Dubuque in 2008 were all Obama operatives; I have no idea how the Obama campaign achieved this, but every single person working the Dubuque Caucus was emblazoned with that creepy Obama ’08 logo that looked like the all-seeing “Eye of Sauron” (or, Soros, come to think of it). The Obama poll workers disenfranchised many Hillary voters at the Caucus by running a scam at the Caucus check-in table: elderly voters, who were more inclined to vote for Hillary than Obama, were told they were at the wrong Caucus location when they tried to check-in. I witnessed this firsthand and saw these Obama operatives sending many elderly people away from the tables, confused, not knowing what to do since “the woman running the Caucus said I’m in the wrong place”.
Hillary volunteers were driving many elderly people to the Caucus location that night, and I made sure the people we brought to Caucus were indeed allowed to vote — despite the woman wearing Obama gear who sat behind the check-in table and tried to insist these older voters were “in the wrong Caucus” location. Magically, when I demanded she check her registration book again, she found these people’s names (right where they should be) and they were allowed into the Caucus room. If I hadn’t been there, these people would have been sent back out into the cold after being told they had to caucus at a site on the other side of town.
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