A frustrated Joe Scarborough went off on a mini-rant this morning about Iowa using an app to tabulate results. First he complained about out-of-order bathrooms in the Minneapolis airport, and compared it to the chaos of Iowa caucus results.
"It is not about Des Moines bathrooms, it is about paper ballots. Does last night not show again -- people with their crappy little apps," he sneered.
"Remember Mitt Romney's crappy little app? 'I got the best app in the world, you know Mitt was a tech guy.' And it crashed two minutes in. But Rev, we gotta have paper ballots everywhere. You want to rig a process, make sure there is no paper involved."
"No question about it, what people need to realize that the people in Iowa were disenfranchised," Rev. Al Sharpton pronounced. "We talk about voter rights, they robbed people.
"They came out and said weeks, some of them. Whatever the results come out, it will almost not matter. It will be under a cloud now. What about the people of Iowa? I also think it will be the last Iowa caucus. Now all of a sudden everybody will say move it out of Iowa."
The only part I agree with is that we need paper ballots. But the rest?
First of all, the Iowa caucuses are thoroughly documented -- on paper. The delay is that they are re-tallying the results from the original paper.
There will be no "cloud" over the results. The app was for tabulation of the final results only. They have the information on paper to prove the results.
No more conspiracy theories, please. We wouldn't even have had this caucus if Bernie's people on the DNC committee hadn't insisted on it.
Everyone knows the caucuses are deeply undemocratic, because so many people can't take hours out of the day for the process. The next time, Iowa will almost certainly have a real primary, like most other states.
