Reply #43: Caucus fraud in Texas. Remember, there are no caucuses in the GE [View All]

[McCamy Taylor]

http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/05/04/texas-caucus-fraud/

The Obama people ordered Mrs. A. to sit across the room during the delegate calculation, and excluded Hillary supporters from the process. Mrs. A. overheard an Obama supporter call in a false delegate count to Austin. In a 13 delegate precinct where Obama should have won approximately 4 delegates, the Obama supporters attempted to award 19 delegates to Obama. This was not innocent. During my attempts at cell phone diplomacy, the Obama “chair” hung up on me, and refused to talk to the ethical Obama organizer I was paired with at another precinct convention. As with all major attempts at fraud that we identified, this delegate count was rectified in private at the county TDP headquarters, according to TDP rules, but there were no public charges or sanctions. It is my opinion that people should be in jail, but there is not a mechanism for this sort of prosecution, certainly not within TDP rules.

Although I have only volunteered in one state, virtually every Clinton staffer I have talked to has similar stories from other caucus states. While the Hillary field campaign operates and feels very much like typical Democratic campaigns, the Obama campaign is something new to Democratic politics. From my perspective, it looks like it has copied the worst attributes of Republican campaigns, but with unprecedented zeal.

Ironically, only in very well-organized areas like El Paso were we able to even identify the scale of the attempted irregularities. In these areas, we were also able to rebuff most attempts at fraud, correct fraudulent delegate counts, and protect our voters. In less well-organized areas, we did not have enough eyes and ears to identify or stop fraud, and our numbers plunged.