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sixQuarks

Also, why did Buttigeg donate $42k to shadow inc? This should be illegal

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Well for one thing, because his staffer Michael Halle is married to acronym's CEO Tara McGowan.

https://www.axios.com/pete-buttigieg-michael-halle-senior-st...

They paid for text messaging services... campaigns can't purchase software and services from companies now?

https://apnews.com/afs:Content:8464590602

I would say that companies who have ties to competing campaigns shouldn't be allowed to also provide services to the IDP or DNC.

I'd even go further and say that no campaign staffer should be tied to any companies providing services to the campaign.

Edit: clarified - obviously campaigns consult companies for their success, but they shouldn't provide services to both the DNC and the campaign. Edit2: the IDP runs the caucus

Exactly!

That's a huge restriction to put in place with no indication that anything has ever happened like that. The incentives are aligned for both the company to refuse and the campaign to never ask because both would black ball them forever from politics...

I don't think the fact that it hasn't happened yet is a good enough argument.

>The incentives are aligned for both the company to refuse and the campaign to never ask because both would black ball them forever from politics...

Oh no... it shouldn't be voluntary, it should be required. If a company is providing services to a campaign, that same company should not have any role on the election side.

The app was a reporting convenience more than anything. There was an entire paper trail and a manual process to go along with it. It wasn't core to the accurate count at all.

The app is the reason we're on our second day without a full set of results... It's highly suspicious.

Not entirely they're also trying to report far more information out this year than last. Previously there was only the State Delegate Equivalent count recorded and reported and there was no paper trail of the counts at each stage. This year they're tracking the first and second alignments along with the final SDE count.

All of those papers have to be hand recounted because they're not setup to be machine counted.

All the candidates donated, not just Buttigieg. It was a joint venture between all of the primary candidates in Iowa.

This isn’t true. The Sanders campaign never gave anything to Shadow or ACRONYM. From the reporting I’ve seen, Buttigeig was the largest purchaser of their services, with Biden as a distant second.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iowa-caucus-results-delayed-by-...

EDIT:

Since this is apparently a “controversial” statement, here is the FEC data proving this is entirely true:

https://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?data_type=processed&...

Thanks for this. We're flagged off now so no one can see it unfortunately.

I mean, who knows, you have to be a lot more sophisticated to grok the FEC db, for example here's over a half million to AmEx from the Bernie camp, for what?

https://docquery.fec.gov/cgi-bin/fecimg/?201912199166621206

Here's almost half a million to consultants from a big group of donors.

https://docquery.fec.gov/cgi-bin/fecimg/?201904159146174550

There's just so many payments and transfers to/from Senate and Presidential campaign and big donors that just go opaque as without knowing what the recipient really did with that money for every candidate that takes donations, this is a very hard problem to answer without a serious investigation by a team of journalists and lawyers.

So your argument is that there are somewhere secret payments from the Sanders campaign to ACRONYM, a related entity of PACRONYM, an anti-Sanders dark money group and their “tech” company, Shadow?

My comment was in response to someone claiming that all the campaigns in Iowa had funded both groups. There is no evidence of that.

I'd love to see the data on this. The FEC data is a little confusing to browse.

I was on the conspiracy bandwagon until I looked a little more at Shadow Inc. The company also sells a voter database connector called Lightrail: https://shadowinc.io/lightrail as well as a voter SMS spamming platform: https://shadowinc.io/messaging The FEC line items (e.g. for Gillibrand, Biden, Buttigieg) said the money was for software licensing and consulting, so that's probably it.

Yes but the other connections are there. McGowan's husband works for Buttigieg's campaign. It's a conflict of interest. The party should have rules in place for this: either provide services to the campaigns or provide services to the party, not both.

Not sure how much Gillibrand spent, but iirc Biden only spent $1250.

Eventually one of these campaigns will become the overriding majority of the DNC when they win the nomination. It’s how it works in the bylaws of the both parties. The President is the leader of which ever party elected him/her into power until a replacement is made.

Sorry I'm not understanding how this relates to conflict of interest.

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