Last night I had 10 minutes of time to myself and I watched the top story on Rachel Maddow's show. It was about Maine - and the fact that clearly the GOP in Maine was attempting to throw the Caucus to Mitt Romney.
I am not surprised that the GOP establishment would cheat. They are in a full-scale panic. The Tea Party scares them. The libertarians scare them. The coalition that was convenient for the 2010 elections is not convenient right now. The Republicans are having a real political fight, and they really don't know how to handle bottom-up discourse. It's not in their political culture. And the big money people aren't stupid: They know that nominating another Barry Goldwater means another Democratic president wins with 64% of the vote and takes down the Republican house in the process.
But, the fact that this is so out in the open, so blatant - that's really got me amazed. Nothing slick about the cheating here - just utter stupidity.
For starters, everybody's vote should be counted. Even those that are extremely right wing. In short, Ron Paul's and Rick Santorum's voters count, too. This is a Democracy, right?
This isn't a conspiracy - it's way to obvious to be a conspiracy. In Iowa, they declared Romney won it by just a few votes. Then he roared into NH claiming to be so strong that he would be the first Republican candidate to win both states. A week later, whoops, some of the caucus sites reporting had wrong numbers.
The Iowa state GOP first said there was no winner (one last shot to preserve the establishment guy) and then had to admit that Santorum had won. Gee, the first time in history any primary or caucus state reverses the vote? What are the odds it could happen twice in the same election year?
What amazes me about Maine is that it is even more obvious. You have caucus leaders calling the state GOP HQ to report returns then being told they already have them. Come on, really? And then, when given the correct votes, they promised those numbers would be changed. But for many towns, they were not originally counted. The totals for those towns showed 0's on the tally. So nobody voted? And one county even postponed the caucus due to bad weather, rescheduled for one week later, and were told their votes wouldn't count.
Now - now the Maine state GOP says it has collected the votes, but will not release the amended results to the public. I'm not kidding, you can see it right here on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/.... They say this will only serve to prolong any campaign drama. Come on!
I am no defender of Ron Paul, but if he won, well, he won. And just like voter supression laws are repugnant, so are shenanigans like this.
And all of this just so Mitt Romney wouldn't have a complete bagel for the week. Seriously.
If the errors in Iowa and Maine are just due to incompetence, I really don't think the Republican party can survive in those states as an organization for another week. But I don't think it's incompetence. I think the Romney-ites tried to cheat. And they got caught.