Via MSNBC:
The Republican Party of Iowa announced Thursday that Rick Santorum finished ahead of Mitt Romney in its Jan. 3 caucuses, meaning the contest resulted in a virtual tie between the two candidates.
After more than two weeks of certifying the results, the former Pennsylvania senator pulled ahead of Romney by 34 votes despite Romney being declared the winner on Jan. 3 by an 8 vote margin.
The final official numbers stand at Santorum with 29,839 and Romney with 29,805, but the results from eight of the 1774 precincts could not be located and certified, leaving lingering questions as to who is the actual winner of the Iowa Caucus.
Eight precincts missing? How convenient. For whom, I'm not sure. Depending on where those precincts were located, it could have affirmed Romney as the winner or widened Santorum's lead. Unfortunately, we'll never know because not only can they not locate the paper ballots used to vote, they can't find the vote tallies either.
Brad Friedman at The Brad Blog hailed the Iowa caucuses as an example of true, transparent democracy because the votes were cast on paper and counted one by one. Of course, the problem with that conclusion is that it includes an assumption that when votes are cast, they're counted and retained. In this case, Republicans managed to corrupt true transparency yet again by "losing" eight full precincts of caucus voters. If nothing else, I think they've proved that Republicans simply cannot handle the most rudimentary aspects of democracy.
All of this is largely symbolic anyway, since delegates are not bound by the results of the caucus. Still, it exposes the hypocrisy of conservative hand-wringing over dead voters when they can't even count the ones who are alive properly.
