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bedsitter23As you recall, Mitt Romney won the GOP caucus in Iowa by eight votes.
All was well and good until a Ron Paul supporter (of course) said the number his precinct reported was different from the number he wrote down and planned on posting on Facebook. He wrote down 2 votes for Romney. They wrote down 22.
It should be noted that the Republican caucus (besides that whole 'your schedule has to be free at 7pm or your vote doesn't count' thing) resembles a normal election (Well, there's that 'people get up and give speeches about their favorite candidate' thing too, but you follow me). So, it's not like a Democrat caucs in which you have to pubically declare your vote, and it's pretty damned easy to tell the difference between 2 and 22.
It's all moot anyway. Santorum got a bounce for getting a solid second. It's just as he won the damned thing (and at the end of the day, he's unlikely to be the nominee anyway). Romney would have survived with a close second anyway.
The whole thing is bad for Iowa, in that people think caucuses are damned weird things. They are. The whole thing is run by volunteers and if the actual voting isn't done in someone's barn, it at least feels that way.
The vote had to be certified this week, and the news was reporting that no one would be the winner.
That didn't actually quite happen, but when everything was totaled up, it showed Santorum winning the Caucus by 34 votes. So that was the headline (Even then, some precincts didn't make the deadline, so in fact, we will never know what the exact totals were. Some say that there were as many Romney votes missed as there were added).
All said, the Caucus confusion is likely to get a lot of mileage- already taking credit for Gingrich's surge from a 10-point deficit to taking a 2-point lead in South Carolina; to the usual "They are taking our first in the nation status" away fears.
All was well and good until a Ron Paul supporter (of course) said the number his precinct reported was different from the number he wrote down and planned on posting on Facebook. He wrote down 2 votes for Romney. They wrote down 22.
It should be noted that the Republican caucus (besides that whole 'your schedule has to be free at 7pm or your vote doesn't count' thing) resembles a normal election (Well, there's that 'people get up and give speeches about their favorite candidate' thing too, but you follow me). So, it's not like a Democrat caucs in which you have to pubically declare your vote, and it's pretty damned easy to tell the difference between 2 and 22.
It's all moot anyway. Santorum got a bounce for getting a solid second. It's just as he won the damned thing (and at the end of the day, he's unlikely to be the nominee anyway). Romney would have survived with a close second anyway.
The whole thing is bad for Iowa, in that people think caucuses are damned weird things. They are. The whole thing is run by volunteers and if the actual voting isn't done in someone's barn, it at least feels that way.
The vote had to be certified this week, and the news was reporting that no one would be the winner.
That didn't actually quite happen, but when everything was totaled up, it showed Santorum winning the Caucus by 34 votes. So that was the headline (Even then, some precincts didn't make the deadline, so in fact, we will never know what the exact totals were. Some say that there were as many Romney votes missed as there were added).
All said, the Caucus confusion is likely to get a lot of mileage- already taking credit for Gingrich's surge from a 10-point deficit to taking a 2-point lead in South Carolina; to the usual "They are taking our first in the nation status" away fears.
