Posted on 01/05/2012 9:30:57 PM PST by Mozilla
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is shrugging off reports that the vote count from Iowa’s caucuses might be wrong, saying the errors appear not to change the fact that he and Mitt Romney were nearly tied.
Santorum tells Fox News that a party official says the two cases in which errors were reported in the count from Tuesday night nearly cancel each other out.
A Ron Paul supporter told Des Moines TV station KCCI that the posted count from his precinct in Appanoose County gave Romney more votes than he actually received.
The GOP chairman in Iowa, Matt Strawn, says in a statement that state party officials don‘t have any reason to believe the final results from Appanoose County will change the outcome of Tuesday’s vote.
KCCI-TV:
DES MOINES, Iowa — Caucus night was chaotic in many places, with hundreds of voters, candidates showing up and the throngs of media who followed. The world’s eyes were on Iowa. But in the quiet town of Moulton, Appanoose County, a caucus of 53 people may just blow up the results.
Edward True, 28, of Moulton, said he helped count the votes and jotted the results down on a piece of paper to post to his Facebook page. He said when he checked to make sure the Republican Party of Iowa got the count right, he said he was shocked to find they hadn’t.
“When Mitt Romney won Iowa by eight votes and I’ve got a 20-vote discrepancy here, that right there says Rick Santorum won Iowa,” True said. “Not Mitt Romney.”
True said at his 53-person caucus at the Garrett Memorial Library, Romney received two votes. According to the Iowa Republican Party’s website, True’s precinct cast 22 votes for Romney.
“This is huge,” True said. “It essentially changes who won.”
A spokeswoman with the Iowa Republican Party said True is not a precinct captain and he’s not a county chairperson so he has no business talking about election results.
In addition, there are no official results yet. They are going through everything. So it is quite possible that there could be multiple errors like this found. At this point, so far as I can tell, there have been two reports of errors in reporting.
Rick Santorum has personally said that he knows of those two errors, one of which is this report, and that the results would end up making Romney the winner by 9 votes instead of 8.
There is no advantage to Santorum at this point in a focus on the vote counts. He knows that the “2nd-place finish” was just like a win for him, and any focus on 10 votes here or there will just detract from what is coming next.
ONE vote matters. Each ONE of our votes should matter. I stayed up until 2:00 A.M. to find out who won, and it was the strangest thing, but first they announced that they were waiting for votes being driven in to the counting location “by a guy in a pick-up truck”. Then they said they couldn’t find the votes from the last two remaining precincts. Then we were told of an error in an already counted precinct. And all of this information came from Karl Rove who supposedly had contacts in all of the areas in question. This is the same establishment Karl Rove who has been pushing Romney on us and using his super pac to buy negative ads against all of Romney’s opponents. Curious, isn’t it?
Here’s what Santorum has to say:
“Here’s what I know,” Santorum told Fox News. “Having talked to the chairman Matt Strawn, who is the chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa, that all these counties are going to be reporting in, they’re going to be certifying them that there was one county where there was a 20-vote mistake in my favor but there was a 21-vote mistake in Romney’s favor so it actually netted out to what I understand is a one-vote difference.”
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