GOP Ignores Voting Irregularities In The Iowa Caucuses

Maybe I’m distrustful by nature, but something about the Iowa caucuses’ results last night bothers me.

Just weeks ago, anonymous left-wing activists threatened the Iowa Republican Party with hacking its vote totals. The Hawkeye state GOP insisted all was fine but took the threat seriously enough to alter its usual methods.

In the weeks leading up to the vote, the Republican Establishment variously bullied, cajoled, ignored, or blackmailed the state’s voters about how they must vote. National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote, “If [Iowa voters] deliver victory to a history-making Ron Paul, no one should take them as seriously again.” GOP strategists Ford O’Connell and Matt Mackowiak wrote an article entitled, “Ron Paul Can’t Be Allowed to Win Iowa.” Brit Hume took to the airwaves of Fox News that evening saying if Ron Paul won, Iowa would probably lose its prized first-in-the-nation status.

After the vote was completed, the results were tabulated in an “an undisclosed location.” Then, ballots mysteriously went “missing.” Fox News anchors began repeating tall tales of someone in a pickup truck driving the results around the state’s backroads. (The story turned out to be erroneous.) Although bemused and punchy, none seemed particularly concerned about ballots missing from the ballot place.

When the vote total showed Sen. Rick Santorum up by four votes, Karl Rove announced on Fox that he had gotten news from the Republican National Committee in New York that Mitt Romney’s votes had been “undercounted” in two precincts in Story County. In Clinton County, the official vote count was missing, but representatives of the Romney and Santorum campaigns Democrats who committed vote fraud against other Democrats in the Indiana primary in 2008?

I doubt it. I’m concerned to see how passive they are when irregularities are seen in Republican races.