Hey, media villagers! Rick Santorum is the ‘official’ winner of Iowa Caucus

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Aha! Just as I posted at the time, A typo may have led to 'Mittens' Romney's win in Iowa. It turns out that Tea-Publicans don't know how to count after they run out of fingers and toes, and can't do math.

The "official" results are in and Rick "man on dog" Santorum is the official winner of the Iowa Caucus. Final Iowa Results: Santorum Tops Romney, but We’ll Never Know Who Won:

Rick Santorum collected more caucus votes in Iowa, by the state party’s final count, but we’ll never know who really won.

The Republican Party of Iowa told the Des Moines Register Thursday morning that the final count shows Santorum winning by 34 votes after precincts certified their results. But eight precincts’ results will never be recovered and certified, party officials told the paper.

The current, incomplete count: 29,839 votes for Santorum and 29,805 votes for Mitt Romney.

* * *

Since the Iowa Republican Party announced on caucus night that Romney had edged Santorum by a mere eight votes, it has been collecting certified results forms from Iowa’s counties and precincts.

Thursday’s results are final. Santorum will forever hold a lead with incomplete returns.

By now, though,  it may not matter  whether Santorum officially won. Before Thursday morning’s announcement, the candidate and major media outlets had already declared Iowa an effective tie, and Iowa does not award delegates to any candidate. Unlike for most states, Iowa’s delegates to the Republican National Convention are free to support whichever candidate they choose, and the state will not select those delegates until June.

Romney’s campaign put out a statement this morning, calling the results a “virtual tie,” and that did not sit well with longtime Santorum strategist and adviser John Brabender. Santorum Adviser on Iowa: Romney ‘Sounds Like a Kid Who Didn’t Get What he Wanted for His Birthday …’:

“Well, someone should tell that to Mitt Romney.  He sounds like a kid who didn’t get what he wanted for his birthday so he smashed the cake,” Brabender told ABC News when asked  for his reaction to the news that Santorum  might have won the first caucus state after all.

* * *

The Des Moines Register  broke the news this morning of the 34-vote lead, but because the results from eight precincts had not yet been counted, the Iowa GOP said it was too close to call. Of course, just as the eight votes on the early morning of Jan. 4 was a victory for Romney, the Santorum campaign sees the 34 votes  the same way.

“If eight votes was a victory, then 34 that’s a landslide,” Brabender said, “We each have one. It’s a draw.”

There is a bigger issue here than Iowa Republicans with such lax election integrity protocols that they can't even certify their GOP caucus votes.

It is that we allow a media consortium, typically the AP, to "declare" a winner based upon projected votes on election night. It was the media villagers who declared Willard "Mittens" Romney the winner in Iowa, and this fed into the media villagers' "expectations game" style of reporting. It allowed "Mittens" Romney to claim a win in Iowa for the past two weeks which no doubt aided him in New Hampshire and has been used by the GOP establishment and the conservative media noise machine to argue that Romney is the inevitable nominee and that the primary season should end after South Carolina.

This is why we can't have nice things in this country. We have allowed the corporate media villagers to decide our elections rather than our votes (flashback to election night in 2000 and the Florida fiasco).

By the way, this means that the GOP primary rule remains intact: the winner of the Iowa Caucus (Santorum) still has never won the New Hampshire Primary (Romney).