Donald Trump uttered the word and visited the place. We’re talking about Iowa. And off we go, the 2024 presidential election is under way.

There is virtually nothing democratic about the Iowa caucuses. But that has not kept Democrats from worshiping at the altar of Des Moines, Bettendorf and Dyersville where there is a Field of Dreams.

At a time when virtually all Democrats in the House and forty-eight in the Senate are strongly advocating strengthening our democracy with The For the People Act (H.R. 1) and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (H.R. 4), the party is hamstrung by Republicans and a few of their own, most notably Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ).

The Democratic Party also has a structural disadvantage in the U.S. Senate. While far more Americans vote for the 50 Democrats in the Senate than the 50 Republicans, any gain that Democrats would accrue is negated by the gerrymandered nature of the Upper Chamber. Wyoming has as many senators as California even though California has 57 residents for every individual in Wyoming.

But there is one part of our political process where Democrats can effect meaningful change without constitutional changes. This is the manner in which the party of progressives selects its nominees for president. The method for choosing nominees for president is as archaic and undemocratic as any part of our political process, and Democrats do not seem particularly concerned about it.

The quadrennial nomination process begins in Iowa. With a population of 3.1 million people, it represents less that one percent of the United States. The U.S. is 13.4% African-American; Iowa is 4.1%. The U.S. is 18.5% Hispanic; Iowa is 6.3%. In the U.S. as a whole, 13.6% of the population is foreign-born; in Iowa the number is 5.3%. Oh, and Iowa does not have a presidential primary; it has caucuses in which less than 10% of eligible voters participate.

Just across the Mississippi River from eastern Iowa is Illinois. Like Iowa, Illinois is rich in farmland and rural development. But it also is home to America’s third largest city, Chicago. It is a state that consistently votes Democrat, thus making it an excellent state in which candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination can compete. It has minority representation reflective of the country as a whole. It has strong components of virtually every crucial constituency of the Democratic Party.

It clearly makes sense for the Democrats to open their primary season in a state like Illinois. However, we all know that relegating Iowa to a lower ranking would not play well in Iowa. In the past six presidential elections, Democrats carried Iowa in 2000 (Al Gore) as well as 2008 and 2012 (Barack Obama), so there may well be a price for Dems to pay if they relegated Iowa in the nomination process.

If the Democrats choose to engage in meaningful electoral reform, it will require creating a level playing field across the country. The process of leveling will mean that some states like Iowa will have less clout in the nomination process and other states like California will have far more.

It is quite possible that in the short run, the Democratic Party will lose support in smaller states. But that is already happening, and trends indicate that Democrats will be paying less attention to New Hampshire and more to Texas.

But once the Democratic Party has a clear policy of promoting democracy across the board, it will be easier for it to argue for statehood for the District of Columbia as well as Puerto Rico. Both such developments would help Democrats bring more democracy to the U.S. Senate. Once that happens, our country will be much closer to operating as a true democracy.

It’s a small window of opportunity to talk about Iowa without getting thrown out of the room. Now is the time for Democrats to initiate that conversation. Promoting true democracy should be a consistent goal for the Democratic Party.

The post How Democrats Can Promote Democracy starting with Iowa appeared first on Occasional Planet.

If the Iowa Caucus debacle has you worried about the way American elections operate, please remember that a caucus is not an election. The Democratic caucuses operate outside of the official election system. They’re run by the party, not by the professional election administrators who oversee regular elections. The harried precinct chairmen you saw on TV last week (Feb. 3) are not employees of a county election jurisdiction. The Iowa Secretary of State and the county auditors who supervise elections in their areas have no official role in the caucuses, so they do not regulate the events. People attending the caucuses are not voting, and the results are not counted, recorded or checked by the county auditor’s office. Election officials don’t set the date or manage the caucus sites. Caucuses don’t run like official election days, with all-day voting hours that make them more accessible to a broad electorate. Unlike the poll workers you see every election at your local precinct or vote center, the people running the caucuses are, essentially, well-meaning amateurs who do the job, perhaps, once every four years.

So, the chaos and incompetence of Iowa’s caucuses should not be regarded as an indicator of problems in the American election system, or a harbinger of things to come as the 2020 election evolves. In real elections, there is a vast army of behind-the-scenes workers and procedures designed to ensure precisely the elements that seem to have been missing in the Iowa caucuses: orderliness, integrity, accuracy and timeliness of reporting, and overall security. For the past twelve months, I have been observing the backstage work at my local election headquarters for an upcoming book, and I have come to feel confident that, in the official world of elections, people are trying hard to get it right, and succeeding most of the time.

If Iowa’s Democratic Party had opted for a primary election, rather than caucuses, the situation could have been very different. Real primary elections fall under the jurisdiction of state election laws, so they are conducted by elected or appointed officials who specialize in the job. In a primary election, all the elements and safeguards that combine to make elections tick would have been in play. I’m not saying that everything would have been perfect: Elections are never flawless. Even most well-thought out election plans can break down because of weather, technology failures, power outages, staffing issues or a myriad of other bumps in the road.

In fact, if Iowa had conducted a primary election, the customized reporting app that apparently failed might not even have been involved. In a primary, which comes under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of State, participants would have cast ballots using state-approved voting equipment, with the results reported according to established procedures. Also, presumably, Iowa election administrators would have applied widely held standards for vetting and pretesting their electronic systems, anticipating and preventing a confidence-destroying failure like the one making headlines in Iowa’s aftermath.

To its credit, the Iowa Democratic Party thought ahead and created a paper trail that may have saved the day. But Iowa’s caucus disaster offers a cautionary tale about relying too heavily on inadequately vetted technology. It’s also a warning about the process employed to buy new election technologies: If news reports are correct, the Iowa Democratic Party may have skipped some important checkpoints in its quest for a company to supply a reporting app and may have awarded the contract to a well-connected but inexperienced tech start-up. In addition, this would probably be an appropriate moment to reconsider the concept of caucuses themselves (particularly holding the first one in Iowa).

Iowa’s caucus debacle was an own goal, a self-inflicted screw-up that has added unneeded confusion to the process of nominating a presidential candidate in a critical election year. But caucuses are a bug in the system, not a feature, and that’s how they should be viewed. Iowa’s caucus process does not represent the rest of the U.S. election system. Don’t let it undermine the essential trust in voting that keeps our increasingly fragile democracy alive.

The post Don’t confuse Iowa caucuses with real elections. They’re a completely different animal. appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Yes, there is no evidence that the cause of the tabulation fiasco in Iowa was because of Russian hacking. But the elephant in the room (besides Donald Trump) has to be Vladimir Putin, who put the fear of disruption in the hearts and minds of all “woke” Americans.

Putin did not need to do anything in Iowa except let his reputation precede him. The powers-that-be in the Iowa Democratic Party, organizers of the caucuses, wanted to try a streamlined method reporting results from each of the 1,681 caucus sites to the central tabulation center in the state capital of Des Moines. They chose to use a new app on smartphones that would immediately communicate results from each of the venues to headquarters.

If this was as recent as the Iowa caucuses four years ago, months before the public learned of Russian efforts to destabilize American democracy by probing and poking into our system of digital communication, there would not have been a problem. The app would have been thoroughly tested and coding errors or other glitches would have been resolved well before the actual caucuses began.

However, in the world of 2020 electronic reporting, we know that Vladimir Putin in Russia and cyber-stalkers in other countries are looking for ways to penetrate American vulnerabilities. When they actually hit a home run, they are able to steal or manipulate data and use if for their disreputable purposes. But they can also be very effective with a “doubles offense” in which the only impact that they have on the United States is to reinforce the fear that exists about the possibility of hacking.

The “doubles offense” is what happened in Iowa this past Monday night. The Democratic caucus organizers did not want to engage in beta testing of their new app in advance of the gatherings for fear that Russia, or some other country or groups of cyber-hackers would engage in nefarious conduct and try to disrupt the system. By not testing the system, they went to a default assumption that it would work fine.

Had it worked as anticipated, everything would have gone smoothly in Iowa. However, there was some sort of an error in the app, perhaps in coding, perhaps in compatibility with the outside world, that brought chaos to reporting the results from around the state to the site of central data tabulation.

The apparent work-arounds did not work. Phoning results in from the field to the central office did not work because there was not a high capacity phone bank at Des Moines headquarters to handle calls from over 1,500 remote sites. In some cases, representatives of nearby caucuses chose to jump in their cars and literally drive their results to the Des Moines headquarters. That did not work because the officials were not allowing outsiders to enter the building.

It’s easy to mock what happened in Iowa and the individuals who designed and implemented the strategy for the evening. But they were in a place in which many of us currently find ourselves; overwhelmed by the complexities of modern computing power. This time it was the Democrats of Iowa who made the seemingly avoidable mistakes; next time it will be someone else.

Two quick lessons that can be learned: (a) we cannot be vigilant enough, and (b) KISS [Keep It Simple, Stupid]; i.e. a straight-up popular vote elections makes counting and recording much simpler than the likes of caucuses or even the Electoral College. Let’s be smart out there!

This article is cross-posted in the POLITICAL INTROVERTS web site.

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The 2020 Democratic Iowa caucuses could become more [small-d] democratic, if changes proposed by the state party are approved—and if they work—which is a big if. Overall, it’s a hopeful sign, for at long last, someone is trying to do something about the crazy system Democrats use for choosing their presidential nominee.

As is well known, the Iowa caucuses are among the [unfortunate] critical first contests in the nomination process. The Democratic caucuses in 2016 were a huge political mess for the party: At the end of the night, the party awarded a razor-thin victory to Hillary Clinton, enraging supporters of Bernie Sanders, who cried foul. [Republicans had a similar—perhaps even worse—fiasco in 2012, when the Iowa party declared Mitt Romney the winner of its straw poll [not a caucus]—but later—after Romney had seized the momentum generated by the first win—figured out that Rick Santorum had actually won.]

In the wake of those problems, the Democratic National Committee recently issued new guidelines for caucuses. The goals include two key points aimed at boosting turnout:

• Same-day registration—allowing caucus-day registration to any voter willing to join the party
• Remote participation—eliminating the requirement of actually being in one of Iowa’s 1,679 caucus locations.

But the DNC doesn’t specify how to accomplish these goals, leaving the nitty gritty to state parties.

According to Steven Rosenfeld at Common Dreams, the changes under consideration would be…

“…the most sweeping and radical changes to [Iowa’s] first-in-the-nation caucuses in 50 years, including potentially adopting online elements that could increase participation by upward of 100,000 voters, according to party leaders.  The mix of offering same-day registration to any voter willing to join the party and an ability to remotely caucus will pose unprecedented outreach, organizing and turnout possibilities for Democratic candidates.”

But…

Obstacles abound. The Iowa Democratic party is still debating how to implement the goals, which add complexity to an already complex caucus set-up. Rosenfeld explains it like this:

“The biggest challenge is not what will likely draw the early headlines: that Iowa likely will be conducting online voting in 2020’s caucuses. Nor will it concern what online technology, vendor, security and authentication would be used. Instead, the party will have to create a counting process where the votes coming into its 1,679 caucus sites are electronically tabulated in an open and coordinated fashion with each round of voting in the caucus sites—where participants break off into groups for each candidate.

Under Iowa’s caucus rules, presidential candidates with less than 15 percent of the votes are excluded from subsequent voting rounds. The caucus ends when all of the remaining contenders are above that threshold. In a typical caucus, supporters of the apparently marginal candidates realign with others, literally by moving across the room to join other groups as the voting continues. To keep this event’s spirit alive, which the Iowa party and DNC say is crucial, the participation and tabulation of voting has to be sequential, coordinated, transparent and verifiable.”

Got that? Me neither. And then, combining in-person caucusing with potential remote alternatives—such as on-line voting, mail-in voting [with ranked-choice ballots], tele-voting and/or proxy voting—could be a logistical and technological nightmare. In addition, the party needs to select technology vendors who can make it all work, and educate voters about the new procedures. It should also be noted that the state election authority, the office with the most experience in conducting elections, is not in charge of the caucuses. That’s the job of the state’s political parties, who do not have the same level of expertise or, presumably, credibility.

I congratulate the Democratic party and Iowa democrats for the impulse to improve the system. But I can’t help thinking that this stubborn insistence on holding caucuses—and being first—and allowing a rural state that doesn’t really represent the majority of Democrats to wield so much power—is the essential flaw in the system.

The post Hope for change in 2020 Iowa caucuses, but… appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I remember that Barack Obama, upon leaving office, said that one of his post-presidency goals was to reform our democracy. He seemed to have particular interest in addressing the travesty of gerrymandering and also looking for enforceable ways to reduce or eliminate voter suppression.

In his first race for the presidency, he seemed to thrive off the elongated, cluttered and senseless system by which fifty states and other territories select their delegates to the national convention where nominees are actually chosen. The first state in play, in 2008 and again scheduled in 2020, is Iowa. This is a state with less than one percent of the nation’s population and whose largest metropolitan area (Des Moines) has not much more than a half million people.

Yet the state of Iowa has an inordinate amount of importance in the way in which we select our presidential nominees. This is extremely non-democratic for at least three clear reasons besides its small population:

1. The length of time that the Iowa caucuses are “in play,” in most election cycles for more than two years, or half the presidential cycle.
2. The nature of campaigning in Iowa which stresses trite activities such as mingling with the animals on the farms and later barbecuing them on the grill.
3. The media focuses far more attention on Iowa than virtually any other state because of its unique positioning. Most of what the media covers is the horse race.

Barack Obama thrived in the retail politics of Iowa, a system that allowed him to fully utilize the young volunteers and paid staff who were so quickly attracted to his campaign. He was a media star in Iowa, particularly being a serious African-American candidate in a state that is barely 2.5% black. So, it worked for him, but that does not make it a legitimate part of a democratic process to choose our leaders.

And now here we go again, 1,131 days before the 2020 presidential election and 847 days before the likely date for the Iowa Caucus. A picture from the Washington Post shows Democrat Tim Ryan running through a park / pasture; seemingly not knowing if he’s a human being running for president or one of the livestock who’s exceptionally hungry.

This is not to say that Tim Ryan is a bad guy or could not possibly make a good president of the United States. But what it does say is that we have a demeaning system for entering the presidential sweepstakes each cycle, and it takes a toll.

Iowa is one of the gateways to excessive money coming into politics. Either Tim Ryan had to spend his own personal money to showcase himself in Iowa, or he is taking contributions from others. It is not cheap to run a presidential campaign and the Iowa caucuses cost a disproportionate amount. There are some candidates who have spent nearly 100 nights in Iowa prior to the caucuses. Once they begin campaigning, they splash advertisements throughout the state, mostly through airwaves. The cost per vote in Iowa is generally greater than it is in any other state. Is it worth it if candidates are trying to meet every voter in Iowa rather than doing their day jobs, which often involve being public servants at public expense?

It is possible to end the Iowa madness; in fact, the entire absurdity of our strung-out campaigns. Barack Obama’s credibility within the Democratic Party is still high. He could call the troops together and for a brainstorming session to change the system to make it more democratic and less expensive. In some cases, they could pressure states to change their systems. In other cases, they could refuse to take the bait and place self-limits on spending and time spent in the states.

Let the Tim Ryan photo (whether he is caught in character or out of character) serve as the poster for the absurdity of the current system. It’s time to move on. If Democrats can unite in bringing sanity to the campaign schedule, they will build more credibility to address other important issues like gerrymandering, voter suppression and eventually abolishing the electoral college.

Oh yes, Hillary Clinton could join Barack Obama on this enterprise, as could Bernie Sanders.

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