If Troy Price were Bolivian, he’d be holed up in a foreign embassy

Troy Price fell on his sickle as Iowa Democratic Party chair after the caucus-night debacle in which results of that supposed exercise of popular sovereignty collapsed ignominiously. By the way, we still don’t know who won most of the absurd SDEs (State Delegate Equivalents), that measure that enabled lab-grown Pete to declare premature victory.

Troy’s the guy who decided that a partial vote count favoring Pete B should be announced, followed by the suspension of all further returns due to the sudden failure of the magic app designed by a team headed by three former Clinton campaign operatives, all of whom love Bernie to death. I guess no one thought cellphones could be used to call in vote totals to a central clearinghouse. And math is so hard.

Some of Bernie’s strongest areas in the state weren’t yet recorded when everything stopped, and some of the arithmetic in the official vote reports are plainly wrong. (Maybe they could hand out calculators to precinct officials next time.) But the early headlines are what counts in Iowa, not one delegate more or less six weeks from now.

This strange incapacity to add up numbers and calculate percentages calls to mind another recent election-night drama that took place just last October in Bolivia. There, three-term president Evo Morales was holding a substantial lead in early returns though short of the 10% margin he needed to win a first-round victory and another four years in office. Then the rapid vote count stopped, sparking suspicion of vote fraud, and the U.S.-dominated Organisation of American States promptly weighed in to denounce exactly that.

We know the rest: the right-wing opposition mobilized, called in the police and army, and ousted Morales. This is called a coup d’état, notwithstanding the ensuing semantic parsing, and it was followed by mass arrests of Morales’ followers, persecution of former officials of the prior government, and by all indications a holy mess. The Trump Administration applauded the armed takeover, and the Democrat response has been muted at best.

But when such Third World antics played out in the U.S., the only outside intervention was from the Democratic National Committee itself, whose operatives were at least as responsible for the ruined election as the local underlings. Troy apologized before being led offstage forever, reinforcing the aw-shucks, gee-whiz impression of mere incompetence rather than nefarious manipulation. As usual, we’ll never know how much of each was at work because making sure elections aren’t well organized in the first place is key to messing with unwelcome outcomes at various key moments downstream. (Watch out for more funny business in famously chaotic and confusing California.)

Price should be glad he presided over a vote count interruption in the U.S. because if the Bolivian rules had applied, his family would be scurrying through the back woods into Minnesota for asylum, his bank account would be blocked, and his entire staff on trial for corruption or perhaps terrorism. That’s how the new Bolivian authorities are taking their revenge on the erstwhile legally constituted government officials there who may or may not have put a finger on the scales. Here, we are more forgiving when the establishment favorite "wins."

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