A huge chunk of the Iowa precincts used a new app earlier this month when voting for their preferred candidate. The app caused a lot of problems when it came to calculating the votes. The change in method was because of concerns during the 2016 caucuses. The individual votes were not shown during that election, so the Iowa Democratic Party chose to take strides to remedy that issue. Unfortunately, these new issues with the app caused more problems than the one that they were trying to solve.
By the evening of Feb. 3, Pete Buttigieg declared himself the winner of Iowa with none of the precincts reporting. His team said that they declared the victory based on reporting data from the polls, but Buttigieg’s early declaration of victory looked foolish to many. Until he won.
It took four days for all of the results to be released. Buttigieg was in the lead, with Bernie Sanders close behind.
Following the problems in Iowa, some have suggested that the issues with the caucasus were worked by the DNC. These people claim that the DNC fabricated the results as a way to tamper Sanders’ campaign momentum.
This is a common belief and accusation in most recent elections. Speculations about interference in elections have become standard within the past decade, especially in the 2016 election.
However, leaning heavily on the idea that all of these elections have been tampered with creates a deeper sense that votes don’t matter. From both the right and left, people have suggested that there are underlying forces that will turn the election their way.
This is incredibly harmful to voters.
Already, many people believe that their individual votes don’t matter, and saying that they won’t matter even further because elections will be tampered with makes them feel even more discouraged.
There is no reason to make voters feel like their voices matter any less. We need to work on pushing forward the idea that individual votes do matter and talking about every election being tampered with is harmful to this goal.
What happened in Iowa was chaos. There is no denying that. And looking into what happened is important, but throwing out accusations that the DNC did something nefarious is going to harm us in the long run.
With the South Carolina primary coming on Feb. 29, it’s time for us to encourage everyone to go vote for their preferred candidate, not to create theories about how those votes don’t matter.
Photo: Kevin Seabrook/ The Johnsonian
