Posted on 01/05/2012 9:30:57 PM PST by Mozilla
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is shrugging off reports that the vote count from Iowa’s caucuses might be wrong, saying the errors appear not to change the fact that he and Mitt Romney were nearly tied.
Santorum tells Fox News that a party official says the two cases in which errors were reported in the count from Tuesday night nearly cancel each other out.
A Ron Paul supporter told Des Moines TV station KCCI that the posted count from his precinct in Appanoose County gave Romney more votes than he actually received.
The GOP chairman in Iowa, Matt Strawn, says in a statement that state party officials don‘t have any reason to believe the final results from Appanoose County will change the outcome of Tuesday’s vote.
KCCI-TV:
DES MOINES, Iowa — Caucus night was chaotic in many places, with hundreds of voters, candidates showing up and the throngs of media who followed. The world’s eyes were on Iowa. But in the quiet town of Moulton, Appanoose County, a caucus of 53 people may just blow up the results.
Edward True, 28, of Moulton, said he helped count the votes and jotted the results down on a piece of paper to post to his Facebook page. He said when he checked to make sure the Republican Party of Iowa got the count right, he said he was shocked to find they hadn’t.
“When Mitt Romney won Iowa by eight votes and I’ve got a 20-vote discrepancy here, that right there says Rick Santorum won Iowa,” True said. “Not Mitt Romney.”
True said at his 53-person caucus at the Garrett Memorial Library, Romney received two votes. According to the Iowa Republican Party’s website, True’s precinct cast 22 votes for Romney.
“This is huge,” True said. “It essentially changes who won.”
A spokeswoman with the Iowa Republican Party said True is not a precinct captain and he’s not a county chairperson so he has no business talking about election results.
Uh huh, right.
Given the proportional delegation of the Iowa caucus, neither candidate technically “won”.
Santorum won in terms of importance, given how his campaign had zero traction prior to the vote.
Uh oh! I think this guy just caught a rat! How dare some chairwoman claim that this man has no right to speak out? Notice she didn’t say that his story was inaccurate! SANTORUM WINS IOWA!!!!! YESSS!!! Bob
Now what else would you expect in this Banana Republic. Get used to it.
Santorum bump.
Did anyone not believe the delay in getting the count, was for the purpose of making Romney the Republican Establishment’s anointed one, the winner?
Does it matter? They both get the same delegate count anyway. What do you want to do? Waste time and money and send lawyers in to recount so that in a month they can declare that Santorum is the real winner of Iowa? No one will care about Iowa at that point.
I understand its the principal of the thing. But it’s not worth it. It is what it is.
yep, the Mormon Mafia was cooking the numbers
it matters to those who had bets on who would win or lose
“A spokeswoman with the Iowa Republican Party said True is not a precinct captain and he’s not a county chairperson so he has no business talking about election results.”
Only Der Gestapo speaks for the party! Heil Romney (arm salute here)
Maybe he was confused by the vast number of votes cast?
Maybe he was confused by the closeness of the tallies between Santorum & Romney.
If the counters come to believe that there are no consequences for fudging a few votes here and there, you will never have another honest election.
The process has to be rigorously monitored ... always.
I can’t believe that I had to tell you that!
There IS a GOP Establishment in Iowa too.
It really does’nt make a lot of difference one way or the other. The MEDIA wanted Romney to win and no matter how many votes were incorrectly counted, they (media) got what they wanted to report. End of story! Now we all have to sit by and watch the next circus act. What a country we have become.
Welcome to FR.
Why would you deny Santorum a critical victory in place of a damned liberal socialist rino like Romney?
I don't think you're taking this as seriously as it needs to be.
Watch the video
the question here then is did this precinct register 73 votes or 53? If 73, the error was a "typo". If 53, then someone has some 'splainin to do.
It would be absurd to believe some randome Ron Paul supporter.
If the results were incorrect, the precinct captain for any of the major nominees would have noted that. Santorum’s guy certainly would have noted the error. For most precincts, multiple candidates had representatives at the vote, and all of them (except Romney’s of course in this case) would be keen to ensure that a misreport didn’t happen.
If it is a transcription error in the preliminary results of course, then when they do the official count it will get cleaned up. That is possible, although again I would have expected each campaign to compare the results reported by their precinct captains with the results being published.
More interestingly, is this guy saying that someone else lost 20 votes, or is he saying that the totals reported were 20 more than the number of people actually there? The 2nd should have been rather obvious to multiple precinct captains, especially since each precinct has an idea of who “won” their precinct, and this error would have changed the order of finish for that precinct.
So, while i don’t completely dismiss this, it is much more likely that the guy was writing down numbers and messed up, writing 2 in place of 22, than it is that the people in charge wrote 22 instead of 2 and nobody caught the error.
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