Why the Iowa caucuses are a complete ageist and classist fraud

[nichomachus]

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/disenfranchised-night-work-the-not-so-democratic-iowa-caucus-and-the-quadrennial-extravaganza/

Night Shaft
In Iowa, as across the nation, lots of people work during the early to middle evening, after the traditional dinner hour. Tow-truck drivers. Nurses’ aides. Nurses. Resident emergency room doctors. EMTs. Hotel receptionists. Cops. Security guards. Second-shift production workers. Custodians. Retail clerks. Waitresses. Dishwashers. Butchers at the grocery store. Chicken-shacklers at poultry-processing plants. Cab drivers. Bus drivers. Activity coordinators at retirement homes. Librarians. The people who rent out ice skates at the rink in the Coralville Mall. I could go on.

Many of these folks would seem to be precisely the sort of working class people one might expect to gain from the enactment of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ progressive domestic social agenda, including a significant increase in the federal minimum wage and single-payer (Medicare for All) health insurance. But most early evening workers can’t participate in the Iowa presidential Caucus pitting Sanders against the corporate Democrat Hillary Clinton next Monday night. There’s no federal or statewide Election Day law requiring employers to let those workers participate in the “beloved Iowa political ritual.” The prime-time workers who want to Caucus have to ask for special permission (so their bosses can find replacements) and give up lost wages to go contend with the bossy and mostly middle- and upper- middle- class professional people who tend to dominate the two-plus hour-long Caucus proceedings.

[NowSam]

1. Should be a National Holiday and open voting hours

Your post is very illuminating.

[jeff47]

3. People still have to work national holidays.

It's not like the hospital closes on the 4th of July.

If we want to keep in-person, single event voting, make it both days of a weekend and require employers give one of the two days off. There will be a small number of people who normally work both Saturday and Sunday, but I suspect they're the smallest group of any two days.

Alternatively, move to mail-in ballots.

[uponit7771]

8. +1

[A Little Weird]

2. Good points

I suspect it's harder to commit election fraud with a caucus system, but it does seem to leave an awful lot of people out.

I'll bet it's also harder on older folks* (who might be more likely to turn out for the establishment-type candidates). Even if they make it out to the caucus location, it seems there's a lot more stamina required to get through the evening than what would be required to just cast a vote.

*I'm not trying to be ageist here I know there are lot of older folks who can run circles around me. I just couldn't think of a better way to say it. I was thinking of my grandma whom I'm confident wouldn't have caucused.

[TacoD]

4. A primary would certainly be more fair

Even though caucus night is a unique experience, I would love to see it changed to a primary.

[Separation]

5. Not just Iowa

But NH as well. Let's all be honest here, you won't start seeing results that really matter till you get to S Carolina.

[bigwillq]

6. I work second shift and like that my state is a primary state

I live in CT.
I don't think I would want to caucus.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

7. And seriously racist....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-jarvis/post_10578_b_9131098.html

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This election, as we've all heard, is dominated by angry white people.

That is because the primary system is fundamentally racist. The first two presidential contests occur in states whose populations are 92% and 94% white, respectively. They are the only primaries that media pay attention to for months beforehand, nevermind that states that look much more like America than episodes of Petticoat Junction -- with cities and African-American and Latino populations -- will soon follow. No, the tide of this election and our future is set by these two racially, demographically, politically, and perhaps emotionally anomalous homelands of the peeved.

Thus the people who have a four-hundred-year birthright to anger are completely disenfranchised from the primary process thus far. And the people who are being attacked as outsiders because they know how to speak another language have no voice in it.

This is how we get Donald Trump: because media are paying attention only to angry white people and because media love the show he gives them. He is media's self-fulfilling news story.

At Davos, Edelman presented its sixteenth annual Trust Barometer and as I've written before, I was shocked by the extent of the worldwide growth in mistrust and anger toward institutions, particularly government, among certain segments of the population. Edelman contrasts the attitudes of the informed elite (the 15% of the population who earn in the top 25% in their countries, are college-educated, and use news often) versus the other 85% -- the rest, the mass.

Edelman found an accelerating disparity in trust of institutions between these two groups. The largest gap occurs in the U.S. with 19 percentage points separating the elite from the mass. There boils the dark and angry cauldron that has produced Trump, Cruz, and -- yes -- Sanders. In the U.K the gap is 17 percentage points. France, India, Australia, Mexico, and nine other nations in Edelman's survey show double-digit gaps.

</snip>