The results of the Iowa caucuses have yet to be released due to problems involving the app used to tabulate results. During a recent episode of The Hill’s Rising , progressive commentator Krystal Ball expressed her belief that the caucuses were rigged.
“It was rigged, what can I tell ya? That is not a conspiracy, it is a simple objective statement of fact,” she began.
Ball pointed to the Iowa Democratic Party’s “absolutely inexplicable decision” to release partial results Tuesday and questioned their reasoning for doing so.
“Why in the world would you take a mess of already historic proportions and make it even worse?” she asked.
Ball noted that the Democratic process is already hampered by mistrust after the Democratic National Committee’s alleged bias against Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders back in 2016 and said that there is currently no reason for any supporter of an anti-establishment candidate to have any trust in the process.
The 38-year-old former MSNBC contributor pointed to the recent Des Moines Register poll that was spiked after Pete Buttigieg’s campaign complained that he was not offered as a choice to some poll recipients, per BuzzFeed News . She also noted Buttigieg’s claim of early victory in Iowa and alleged connections to the developer of the problematic app, Shadow.
To make things more interesting, Shadow is reportedly close with liberal firm ACRONYM, whose top officials have allegedly expressed hostility toward Sanders. The firm is also run by Democratic operative Tara McGowan, who is married to Michael Halle, a senior strategist with the Buttigieg campaign.
“You cannot look at the whole timeline and really expect a group of people who are consistently smeared and dissed by the establishment to feel like they are getting a fair shake — of course they don’t feel that way.”
According to Ball, democratic institutions are “clearly sold” to a “coalition of grifters and donors.” She pointed the lack of transparency among Iowa Democratic Party officials, who have not revealed any information on how they picked the precincts they decided to release.
“When’s the rest of it coming? Who knows! Effectively erasing massive swaths of Iowa voters,” she said.
The full results of the Iowa caucuses have yet to be released. As of now, The New York Times reports that Buttigieg leads Sanders by 1.6 percent based on data from 71 percent of precincts.
Buttigieg has 419 state delegate equivalents for a total of 26.8 percent, while Sanders has 394 state delegate equivalents for a total of 25.2 percent.