The DNC's Election Integrity Problem

The United States has kind of a long history of intervening in the domestic politics of other nations around the world we deem to be "undemocratic". Recent examples of interventions like these can be seen in what has recently unfolded in Bolivia with the coup against Socialist President Evo Morales, along with the United States ongoing adversarial relationship with the Socialist Government of Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela. The United States has spent millions of dollars in these nations under the cover of spreading democracy, while in reality we've been spreading authoritarianism and bloodshed in an attempt to open up markets for the expansion of global capitalism.

The Democratic Primary Iowa Caucus's took place last night and the results are still unknown. Every year, up until this year, the results of the Iowa Caucus results have been made public before the night was over. The Iowa State Democratic Party has blamed the delay in making the results public on a malfunction of the new app that was advocated for by Party leadership because they believed it would help defend against attempts to hack into the election results.

Thanks to reporting from Lee Fang at The Intercept we now know that three different sources confirm that the app used by the Iowa Democratic Party to tally the caucus results was developed by a firm called "Shadow". Shadow has been identified as a spin-off from PACRONYM, a new Democratic Party dark money superPAC hybrid. Neither Shadow or the Democratic Party have responded to accusations of tampering with the caucus results, but receipts have come out since last night showing a connection between Shadow and the campaign of South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. 

Receipts show Mayor Pete's campaign made two payments to Shadow on July 23rd of last year totaling $42,500. On top of this blatant act of corruption, the Iowa Democratic Party also made two payments to Shadow totaling $63,183. 

This clear cut case of collusion between Democratic Party leadership and Shadow doesn't end with just the money. Shadow seems to be stacked with former Clinton staffers with strong biases against Senator Bernie Sanders, who has experienced a surge in the polls in recent weeks putting the Democratic Socialist from Vermont in a good position to win Iowa.

The prospect of a Bernie Sanders victory in Iowa right now would put him on a direct path to win New Hampshire and go on to be the Democratic nominee for 2020. This should be great news as Bernie Sanders is the best candidate to beat Trump in the general due to his unique brand of progressive populism. Unfortunately, the Democratic Establishment seems to be just as afraid of a Bernie Sanders Presidency as they are of four more years of the racist autocrat that is Donald Trump.

Upon receiving the Democratic nomination Bernie Sanders would immediately start working to blow up the status quo that keeps the corrupt establishment in power. Bernie would cut the Democratic Party off from receiving corporate donations as soon as he became the nominee, forcing the entire party to fund their campaigns through grassroots support. Donald Trump won't do anything to dismantle the bipartisan establishment that perpetuates the status quo, so naturally the ruling class sees him as less of a threat to their power. 

It seems clear now that the results would have been made public on time if the results were ones that the Democratic Establishment could accept. That's the same reason why the final Des Moines Register poll was excluded the day before the caucus. Democratic Party leadership doesn't want to announce that Bernie Sanders won Iowa while Biden, supposedly the electability candidate, came in a miserable fourth place. 

Within the last hour, partial results from the caucus's have been released by the Democratic Party showing that Bernie Sanders received more votes than Mayor Pete, but Mayor Pete ended up with more delegates. The fact that Mayor Pete has yet to be questioned about his campaigns relationship with the tech company that developed the app used in Iowa Caucus's is journalistic malpractice by corporate media. If this election debacle happened in any other country, the United States would be gnawing at the bit to invade to "spread democracy".

It comes as so surprise that the Democratic Establishment is working yet again to undermine the candidacy of Bernard Sanders, I just feel so naive that I thought they'd wait until the Convention to actually rig the elections.