Whatever the “final results” are from this one, they will never be believed, and will just be ignored.

Next time, I doubt there will be such a thing as the first, the Iowa caucuses that people will pay any attention to.

This was, I understand, among other things, a great moneymaker for Iowa, but after this clusterfunk, I don’t see how this whole thing can be redeemed, and have any credibility at all.

Yes, it was 2011.,Close The Gaps: Disparities That Threaten America

These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who’s the banana republic now?

Even in 2011, when Hugo was still alive and oil was still around $100/BBL, a little digging into databases would show that Chavista Venezuela’s economic growth was far below that of the rest of the world- even with the hundreds of billions of oil revenue. Similarly, even with the brouhaha about the Missions, improvements in education and healthcare were about average or less compared to other countries. Which makes Bernie a knave or a fool? I vote for fool.

Artfldgr: I like it!
* * *
Second the motion.

Plus, there are some other corollaries that follow yours:
(1) if you are trying to pretend you are stupid (rather than malicious), if helps if you aren’t actually stupid;
(2) if the malicious things you are doing look convincingly stupid, there’s a chance they won’t be very effective.

Non illegitimi carborundum.

The Grammar Maven warns us that this is not legitimate Latin, but you get the idea.

I first heard the phrase, in the format I quoted, from the president of my college’s Republican students’ association during the McGovern-Nixon election, and repeated frequently during the Watergate years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimi_non_carborundum

Not that he particularly liked Nixon, and I voted for McGovern (being one of the LIVs of the day; I repented not long thereafter), but it didn’t seem right to him to have the Dems pile onto a landslide winner so strongly. Turns out, the piling on really was unfair; lots of debunking stories are circling the webz.

https://politicsandprosperity.com/2019/08/09/did-nixon-get-a-bum-rap/

I had forgotten this was the FIRST election with the younger voting age; I suspect the Dems thought it would work to their advantage, or they never would have allowed it.

“Nixon received almost 18 million more votes than McGovern, and he holds the record for the widest popular vote margin in any United States presidential election. The 1972 presidential election was the first since the ratification of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.” – Wikipedia

“The Twenty-sixth Amendment (Amendment XXVI) to the United States Constitution prohibits the states and the federal government from using age as a reason for denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States who are at least eighteen years old. It was proposed by Congress on March 23, 1971, and ratified on July 1, 1971, the quickest ratification of an amendment in history.

This amendment was important to the Student [activist protest anti-war] Movement because they declared that if they were old enough to be drafted into a war they were against, then they should be old enough to vote against and have a voice in their government.[1]” – Wikipedia

I actually agree with that reasoning in abstract, but would have preferred raising the draft age to 21.

Artfldgr: I like it!

This is not a lie but also not true. Anyone with an adequate skill set and unsupervised physical access can hack the machine. A proficient person might even add in a wireless access point so “upgrades” can be done the fly.

@Bernie: Hey bro! You won but your delegates get spread out to everyone equally. Isn’t that, like, you know, socialism?

huxley, I read Tom Swift, Doc Savage (ha!), and various mysteries. So there’s plot on polling in the Hardy Bros. (Boys?) books. Interesting. There’s a mediocre film noir entitled “The Fearmakers” (1958) about the early days of rigged polls. Interesting plot, and a good Dana Andrews performance, but low production quality.

Liz, Good for Oklahoma. I’ve read that photo ID requirements are not particularly helpful as most illegal immigrants have fake ones. The other items you mention are definitely impressive, though I’ve thought that mail-in ballots are always corruptible. I’ll bet those measures make a big dent in the problem.