What It’s Like to Attend A Caucus In Iowa
In 2008, I worked a Caucus site in Dubuque, Iowa for Hillary Clinton’s campaign — where I saw firsthand just how terrible a Caucus is and how easy it is for voter fraud and intimidation, election tampering, and other nefarious acts to occur in what is the only-slightly-contained chaos of a Caucus. With the Iowa Caucuses set to convene tonight across the Hawkeye State, you’ll be hearing many in the lazy, agenda-driven media spouting all sorts of drivel about how glorious the Caucus system is and how “unique” and “special” it remains; don’t believe a word of that claptrap. Very few of the talking heads and reporters who will praise the Caucuses tonight have ever actually been to one and seen how disorganized, rife with fraud, and ridiculous Iowa’s voting system is.
Four years ago to the day, my friends and I from Team Hillary here in Chicago were stationed in Dubuque, Iowa and operating out of a small Hillary for President office in a shopping mall. On Caucus Day, we spent the entire morning and afternoon canvassing neighborhoods for Hillary around a Caucus location setup in some sort of recreation center adjacent to another crumbling mall (whose anchor department stores had long ago fled). We spent a good portion of the day checking in with elderly Hillary voters to make sure they could attend the Caucus that evening and helped make transportation arrangements for as many of these people as possible so they could vote for Hillary in the Caucus.
It is both staggering and sickening just how many people are disenfranchised by the Caucus system. Unlike primaries — which allow people to cast their votes any time throughout the day, or even over numerous Early Voting days — to be able to cast a vote in a Caucus a person MUST be present during the entire Caucus, which lasted from 6pm – 10pm or so. People who work second and third shift jobs were not able to vote in the Caucus because they needed to be at work or on their way to work at that time. Parents with small children who did not have babysitters could not participate in the Caucus, because they could not bring their children to a Caucus site and subject them to the hours of sitting around the Caucus requires. Elderly people who could not sit on hard metal folding chairs or stand around in tightly packed corners of a rec center could not participate in the Caucus because of the physical strain all those hours worth of “caucusing” takes on them.
It is the most ridiculous, inane, and unfair system for picking a presidential nominee imaginable. The only reason Caucuses exist is because they are so cheap to produce. The political parties in states with primaries need to pay poll workers to run polling stations, including all the early voting days. In Illinois, poll workers make as much as $200 a day. Multiply that by the number of poll workers required to run polling centers in the entire state for as many as 14 days and it adds up to a lot of money the state political parties don’t want to pay out in places like Iowa.
The poll workers at the Iowa Caucus I attended in Dubuque in 2008 were all Obama operatives; I have no idea how the Obama campaign achieved this, but every single person working the Dubuque Caucus was emblazoned with that creepy Obama ’08 logo that looked like the all-seeing “Eye of Sauron” (or, Soros, come to think of it). The Obama poll workers disenfranchised many Hillary voters at the Caucus by running a scam at the Caucus check-in table: elderly voters, who were more inclined to vote for Hillary than Obama, were told they were at the wrong Caucus location when they tried to check-in. I witnessed this firsthand and saw these Obama operatives sending many elderly people away from the tables, confused, not knowing what to do since “the woman running the Caucus said I’m in the wrong place”.
Hillary volunteers were driving many elderly people to the Caucus location that night, and I made sure the people we brought to Caucus were indeed allowed to vote — despite the woman wearing Obama gear who sat behind the check-in table and tried to insist these older voters were “in the wrong Caucus” location. Magically, when I demanded she check her registration book again, she found these people’s names (right where they should be) and they were allowed into the Caucus room. If I hadn’t been there, these people would have been sent back out into the cold after being told they had to caucus at a site on the other side of town.
The scam the Obama operatives were pulling was this: send as many elderly people on wild goose chases as possible by directing them to a caucus site on the other side of town. The Obama supporters running the Dubuque Caucus location quite rightly believed that the vast majority of these old people would just go home, confused that they were in “the wrong place”. Some of them would attempt to caucus at the other location they were told to go to — but when they’d get there, the Obama operatives running that Caucus site would say “Oh, no, you’re in the wrong place, you need to go to such-and-such caucus”. Because voters had to be inside the caucus location at a certain time and the doors closed at 7pm (with no further participants allowed into the room once the caucus started), it was incredibly easy to disenfranchise likely Hillary voters just by looking at them (since Hillary beat Obama soundly the older a voter was).
Obama operatives running the caucuses allowed many out of state Obama supporters entry into the Iowa Caucuses so they could vote for Obama. At the Dubuque Caucus I attended, the vast majority of people in the room were from Illinois, not Iowa. The parking lot outside the Caucus location was filled with Illinois license plates. Moments before the Caucus doors were closed, a flood of twenty-somethings wearing Obama campaign gear were rushed into the rec center by the Obama operatives manning the door. They all had smirks on their faces, giving away the fact that they knew what they were doing was wrong and that they were going to game the Caucus for Obama by voting that night even though they were not legally allowed to. None of these people were checked in at the registration table. I had been at that Caucus location for several hours at that point and would have recognized these characters since they so clearly stood out amongst the Iowans who were caucusing; Dubuque is a depressed, lower middle class city in Iowa and the Caucus location we were in was in a particularly sketchy part of town where the actual residents wore very inexpensive clothes, sweatpants, old baseball caps, and the like. The flood of last-minute-entrants into the room wearing the Obama buttons had nice coats, trendy haircuts, expensive watches and shoes, and the clear and distinct look of well-off Chicagoans. I complained about what was going on to the people running this Caucus and told them I believed these people were not from Iowa and I was told, “Prove it”. That was delivered with another Obama “smirk”.
This scene was repeated in every Caucus location across Iowa, though most heavily in the cities closest to the Illinois border (which made it much easier to flood the Caucus sites with Obama supporters operating out of Chicago).
When the Caucus began, extremely elderly people attempted to operate the Caucus in an orderly manner but they were quickly shouted down and pressured to the side by the young Obama operatives in the room; it was clear to me that these Obama supporters were trained to take over the Caucuses. Very blatantly, the Obama acolytes introduced race into the mix and implied that anyone not voting for Barack Obama that night had a problem with a black man becoming president and that Hillary Clinton voters in particular would be seen as racists because they were choosing her over a black man in the race for president.
At a Caucus, your vote is naked and in the open. There is no screen, no voting booth, no secret ballot. After numerous speeches and a great deal of shouting and yelling, the elderly people running the Caucus announced it was time to vote. This induced a scramble for people to scurry to various corners of the room that were designated for the different candidates running in the race. Obama voters were told to go to the largest and most comfortable part of the room, where the Obama operatives were loudly cheering for people to come over to stand with them. The “Hillary corner” was designated as the one by the windows, where it was coldest, and where there were few places for the elderly people to sit down. This was done deliberately in my opinion, since there were plenty of folding chairs in the Obama area. Bill Richardson, Dennis Kucinich, Joe Biden, and John Edwards also had areas of the room designated for their supporters.
When people were moving towards the Hillary corner, the Obama acolytes would heckle them, asking them if they were racists and if they had a problem with a black man being president. These Obama thugs used open and hostile intimidation directed at specific individuals to pull them over to the Obama corner. “Hey, grandma in the blue sweater. Yah, you. Are you a racist? Don’t you want a black man to be president? Why are you going over there when Obama’s corner is here? You don’t want everyone to think you are a racist, do you? You don’t want people to know you don’t want a black man to be president, do you? Well, then come join us and vote for Obama and prove you are not a racist”.
I bet they stole 30 of Hillary’s votes by shouting at people in this way. I objected to what they were doing but the elderly people running the Caucus said that it was within the Caucus rules for people to shout, yell, scream, and name-call during this process; they call it “persuasion” and anything that people would shout at each other was allowed as long as no one pushed or shoved or made other physical contact.
Can you please take a moment and imagine this?
You are headed to vote, and people are allowed to shout at you and call you a racist if you don’t vote for Obama. Remember that you are an elderly person who has already been confused and discombobulated by the chaotic and hours-long process. Now people are shouting at you and threatening to tell everyone you know that you are a racist if you are seen voting for someone other than Obama. The peer pressure and public humiliation directed at people in a Caucus is sickening.
There is no other way to describe this than to compare it to voting in a third world banana republic. In movies, this is how voting would take place in a primitive area where chickens would be running around the room and a mule would peek its head through a window looking for water or carrots. The same thuggery that would compel people to vote for Generalisimo Such-and-Such was on display at the 2008 Iowa Caucus forcing many people to vote for Barack Obama.
As long as I live, I will never forget what I witnessed on January 3rd, 2008. I am still horrified that Caucuses are allowed to exist and that voters are disenfranchised and intimidated like this in the United States.
Besides Iowa, the following states run Caucuses: Colorado, Washington, Maine, Idaho, Minnesota, Nevada, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Alaska, and Hawaii.
I honestly and truly hope that Ron Paul wins every single Caucus this year — and I hope that Ron Paul’s most obsessive and vocal supporters are out in force at every Caucus location behaving as badly as the Obama operatives did in 2008. In 2012, more people will have cell phones on them with video cameras and hopefully the horrible behavior of Caucus-goers will be documented and put on display via YouTube so that every state conducting a Caucus will be embarrassed. The Caucus system is an unfunny and horrifying joke.
After what happened in 2008, filmmaker Gigi Gaston put together the documentary “We Will Not Be Silenced 2008″ to document what the Obama campaign did to game the Caucus system and intimidate voters four years ago. The agenda-driven media aggressively covered the Caucus abuses up, because they were in full-court Obama defense mode. Since the media hates Ron Paul so much, I hope in 2012 they will decide to cover the shenanigans that will no doubt occur during the Caucuses he participates in — so that more people can see just how terrible Caucuses are.
So many states use Caucuses not only because they are cheap to produce — but also because the two political parties both believe they can recruit political volunteers from the Caucus goers. Their reasoning is that if someone is willing to subject him or herself to the ordeal of a Caucus, then that person can most likely be counted on for political donations or for volunteering in the general election campaign. The parties believe the Caucuses, which they recognize as being terrible to endure, weed out the truly committed political types from those who can only be bothered to swoop in and vote quickly in a primary and then go back to their own worlds.
I have no idea how to eliminate the Caucuses, but Ron Paul winning the majority of them will do a lot to discredit them. The permanent political class wants to keep the Caucuses and would no doubt love a Caucus in YOUR state too, if they could get away with it, because it’s so easy to manipulate the outcome of the Caucuses through fraud and voter intimidation — as Barack Obama proved so glaringly in 2008.
It is the absolute worst and most soul-crushing feeling in the world for me to be writing this on January 3rd, 2012 with the Iowa Caucus happening yet again. Four years have passed since I witnessed firsthand the chaos and ineptitude of the 2008 Caucus, but here we go again, with nothing changed: Iowa is still voting first, despite the fact that Iowans DO NOT actually take this process seriously and are only interested in being lavished with personal attention like spoiled little divas; the Caucus is happening again, so people are going to be disenfranchised, bullied, and intimidated again and no one is stopping that from happening; the agenda-driven media is most likely going to praise the “uniqueness” of the Caucuses and not give the great majority of Americans the first clue on how terrible this process truly is.
How do YOU think we change things going forward so this madness can stop and 2012 becomes the very last year that Iowa kicks a presidential nominating contest off in such a chaotic, un-American, and ridiculous way?
© 2012, Kevin DuJan. All rights reserved.
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Any possibility of simply stopping the Caucuses and simply going back to the closed door nominations? I hate that idea, but it would hardly be less democratic than what you write about in Iowa.
How important is Iowa by itself, anyway? I've heard a lot of people poo-pooing it and telling everyone else to just ignore it. Is it important by itself, or simply as a microcosm of all the curruption in the system, overall?
YOu have made a great argument that we need to get rid of caucuses. As the father now of a one year old, I know my wife and I both could not make it and sit there for 2-3 hours. No absentee ballot, etc.
Thanks for sharing this, Kevin. Gov. Palin is the only candidate for whom I would endure what you describe. My hope and prayer is that many Iowan caucus voters feel likewise. The only way I can see Iowa possibly redeeming itself from the caucus situation you describe would be for the "Vote Rogue" Palin Earthquake write-in effort to achieve an upset victory or, at least, a huge number of votes. For any of the other candidates to win the Iowa caucuses today will be proof positive that all the corruption, evil, fraud, intimidation you describe has succeeded in trampling the will of 'we the people' and the sanctity of the individual vote, marking a sad day in the history of our democratic republic.
Kevin wrote: "After what happened in 2008, filmmaker Gigi Gaston put together the documentary “We Will Not Be Silenced 2008 to document what the Obama campaign did to game the Caucus system and intimidate voters four years ago."
Here are some links I saved in my archives for future reference:
Thu, 11 Sep 2008:
The naive Hillary supporters in this video were just "ACORNED" by Obama supporters and are totally dumb-struck.
"We will not be silenced" Women tell of their personal experiences of voter fraud. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGZFgMNM-UU
The ACORN Obama knows
By Michelle Malkin • June 25, 2008 12:10 PM http://michellemalkin.com/2008/06/25/the-acorn-ob…
Democrats show how Obama stole the election from Hillary Clinton in 2008:
VIDEO: “We Will Not Be Silenced” (4 parts)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGZFgMNM-UU&fe….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXNqFQmGxDU&fe….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4XFvq5XMk8&fe….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnclKiHwatw&fe….
Kevin please check this out..hope you find it in you to post and inform all here, about what is really going on! I like to call it the round table for WAR.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7saPfv9Vrc&fe…
That sounds truly awful and so dispiriting. Thanks for telling it all again.
I hope they are more fair this year. Don’t the Republican caucuses have secret ballots? (obviously that wouldn’t address the other problems, but I’m just wondering)
Posting an excerpt and linking back to you. This is important information that I was not aware of.
http://mainfo.blogspot.com/2012/01/horrifying-rea…
The Iowa Republican caucuses are conducted differently than the Iowa Democratic caucuses. The Republicans vote with a secret, written ballot. The ballot has all of the candidates on it and it also has a write-in spot. There is also no "second round" in the Iowa Republican caucuses. In the Iowa Democratic caucuses, any candidate who not does get at least 15% in the first round is eliminated, and there is a second round of voting. But there is no second round in the Iowa Republican caucuses.
I could not agree with you more, Kevin. I live in Nevada and the same process was used in this state – particularily Las Vegas. The Hillary campaign even ended up sueing the Dem party in the form of naming the then party chair in the suit. Of course, as you can imagine, nothing much ever came of it. The stupid practice was proposed and instituted – with compliance from the establishment Republicans – by none other the infamous Dirty-land-deal Harry Reid. Actually the process suceeded in not only getting Obama chosen in Nevada but was also successfully destroyed the Republican party by – guess how? Creating a complete split in the party over the Ron Paul-bots. It is interesting to note that those people in combination with the "establishment" that worked hard to get the caucus as the means of choosing a nominee as opposed to the Primary process that had always been in place.
I absolutely abhor the process for the every reasons you note as well as disenfranchising many more voters than it helps. It allows rampant voter fraud – it's as simple as that!
Hillary Clinton won the Nevada Caucus.
Obama did not win it. It’s one of the few Caucuses that Hillary won.
In the end, because of the proportional distribution of delegates Hillary and Obama may have ended up with the same amount (with Hillary getting one or two more maybe) but Hillary did win Nevada.
It was a big deal at the time because the media kept insisting that the SEIU endorsement of Obama would mean all the union workers in the state would guarantee a win for Obama…and that did not happen.
I remember clearly that Hillary won because I ran a phone bank for her in my apartment and had people stay over to watch the results come in and we were cheering and celebrating that day…and that would not have happened if Obama had won it.
"How do YOU think we change things going forward so this madness can stop and 2012 becomes the very last year that Iowa kicks a presidential nominating contest off in such a chaotic, un-American, and ridiculous way?"
I'm flabbergasted. Until Americans are aware of all this, and this may be the year to expose it, nothing will even be suggested to change it.
Kevin, The Republican caucus is much different than the democrate caucus. We have our own ballets and we vote for who we want. There isn’t anyone trying to bully you into voting for who you do not want to vote for. You are given a chance to speak about the candidate your support but everyone is given a fair chance to talk. I agree that the Ron Paul supporters will be out in full force. But I am going and I am supporting Newt. I will speak about why I think he is the best candidate. I wanted to Sara to run with all of my heart…she chose not too. I would love to write her in…but I’m not going too. I don’t want to waste my chance to show support for a person on the ticket that I think will do a good job of being our next Presdent. The more I hear from him the more I like him.
I’d love for you to chime in after you get back from the Caucus. Tell us how it was.
I have to break my reply into segments as it won't let me post it all together. I live in Clinton County and so we are divided into smaller areas. I'm in what is called a township. I was greeted at the door by a Ron Paul supporter. He wanted to know if I had made up my mind on a candidate, I told him I had. He asked if it was Ron Paul and I politely told him no it was not. He asked me if I might change my mind…I told him that I would not in regards to Ron Paul. He wasn't even from this area, he lives Illinois. There were two different area caucuses being held where I was, he spoke at both. He was well prepared. He talked about Ron Paul. Only one person voted for Ron Paul. I talked about Newt and people were polite and listened. I was the only one who voted for Newt. Rick Santorum had the most votes with Romney in second. I wasn't surprised about Rick Santorum but I was surprised about Romney.
The people had already made up their mind who they wanted to cast their ballot for and so I was impressed with that they had clearly done their time in studying the candidates. Afterwards I number of them talked to me about Newt and there reservations about him. I was able to share with them why those things did not concern me. At the end of the day we will all support whoever the candidate is because we do not want Obama in there. We also talked about planks for the Republican platform. I was nominated to be one of the delegates at the County Convention in March. When the man called the votes in he had someone sit next to him and listen as to what he said because he wanted everyone to know that he gave the correct report. I know the Democratic caucuses are very different and there is a lot of cheating that goes on. Everyone had to sign in and if you were not known you had to show your drivers license.
The Ron Paul supporter was disappointed about the vote but he was respectful.