Fake News: DNC NOT Caught Flipping Votes From Bernie To Buttigieg

Fact Check

  • by: Ryan Cooper

STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

UPDATE: After we published this story, YouTube host Jimmy Dore reached out to Lead Stories about the fact check. We offered to revise the rating and advised him on the necessary steps that would be required - chiefly, that the headline be revised. However, Dore abruptly ended the discussion and did not request a revision. In a subsequent video post, he called our fact check on his headline and content a "quibble." Instead, Dore has resorted to making personal attacks and homophobic slurs via Twitter and YouTube. Dore suggests that Lead Stories has a bias or is "pro-establishment" and that we support Pete Buttigieg for president. This is also untrue. We debunk false information on all segments of the political spectrum.

Did the Democratic National Committee get caught flipping votes from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders to former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg during the 2020 Iowa caucus? No, that does not appear to be true: The reporting out of Iowa suggests that Sanders' delegates mistakenly went to Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, not Buttigieg.

The claim originated from a video published by The Jimmy Dore Show on February 6, 2020, titled "DNC Caught Flipping Votes From Bernie To Buttigieg" (archived here).

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DNC Caught Flipping Votes From Bernie To Buttigieg

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Jimmy Dore, a left-leaning stand-up comedian and podcaster, discussed the voting irregularities in Iowa and the chaos that ensued after the state's caucus on February 3, 2020.

The headline of the video claimed, "DNC Caught Flipping Votes From Bernie to Buttigieg." Dore spent some time pointing out that Patrick had an unusually high number of votes from Black Hawk County, and he referenced a social media post that suggested a mistake in the reporting of results.

However, Dore did not offer specific evidence that the DNC deliberately flipped votes or delegates from Sanders to Buttigieg.

Subsequently, Chris Schwartz, the Black Hawk County Board of Supervisors in Iowa and state co-chair for Bernie 2020, went on Twitter to suggest the delegates went to Patrick. No mention was made of votes flipping to Buttigieg:

The next day, Schwartz appeared on Democracy Now! and spoke about the irregularity. According to a transcript of the show, he said:

And we put the results out there on Twitter and Facebook, apparently just at the same time that the Iowa Democratic Party was releasing another round of results, to find out that they had given all these Bernie Sanders delegates in Black Hawk County to Deval Patrick. Deval Patrick - and it shouldn't even come as a surprise to Deval Patrick himself - didn't have any support in Black Hawk County that evening. And so, we're just finding out that, as we were putting out these results, they were putting out results that are totally contrary. And I think it forced them to immediately walk back what they had put out.

While Dore pointed out that Buttigieg, for a time, had 10 more delegates than the numbers Schwartz maintained that the former mayor had, there is no reporting to suggest that the mistake was the result of the DNC flipping votes. KWWL-TV reported on the correction made to Black Hawk County results and that Patrick was the beneficiary, not Buttigieg.

One theory on Twitter is that Patrick's name is alphabetically next to Sanders, and the data was entered in the wrong line.

Lead Stories has not verified that claim.

The chaos that ensued in reporting the official Iowa caucus results has prompted DNC chairman Tom Perez to call for an immediate recanvass of the totals.

Lead Stories reached out to Dore and his team, but we did not receive a response. If we do, we will update this story accordingly.

Updates:

  • 2020-02-13T19:36:09Z 2020-02-13T19:36:09Z
    After we published this story, YouTube host Jimmy Dore reached out to Lead Stories about the fact check. We offered to revise the rating and advised him on the necessary steps that would be required - chiefly, that the headline be revised. However, Dore abruptly ended the discussion and did not request a revision. In a subsequent video post, he called our fact check on his headline and content a “quibble.” Instead, Dore has resorted to making personal attacks and homophobic slurs via Twitter and YouTube. Dore suggests that Lead Stories has a bias or is “pro-establishment” and that we support Pete Buttigieg for president. This is also untrue. We debunk false information on all segments of the political spectrum.

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  Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper, a staff writer and fact-checker for Lead Stories, is the former Director of Programming at CNN International, where he helped shape the network's daily newscasts broadcast to more than 280 million households around the world. He was based at the network's Los Angeles Bureau. There, he managed the team responsible for a three-hour nightly program, Newsroom LA.

Formerly, he worked at the headquarters in Atlanta, and he spent four years at the London bureau. An award-winning producer, Cooper oversaw the network's Emmy Award-winning coverage of the uprising in Egypt in 2011. He also served as a supervising producer during much of the network's live reporting on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in 2006, for which CNN received an Edward R. Murrow Award.

Read more about or contact Ryan Cooper

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