The delayed Iowa caucus results erode trust in elections at a really bad time

And it’s even more dangerous when you have an incumbent president who has repeatedly claimed Democrats engage in voter fraud and has said at least 27 times that he would like to stay in office beyond constitutional limits.This site is protected by recaptcha Privacy Policy | Terms of ServiceThe mess in Iowa — in which the count of a small number of voters in a small state in just one party’s nominating contest took nearly a day to start to be announced because of failures in a new vote reporting app, allowing for the outcome to be muddied and easily challenged -- plays directly into the hands of President Donald Trump or Russia or anyone who might have a vested interest in charging that the national election process is unreliable. One, the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee could jointly appoint an independent expert to certify results in a disputed election rather than leaving it to the traditional ad hoc judgments of secretaries of states and court challenges — a process that is almost certain to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, potential disputes.Reporters and headline writers who use words like “confusion” and “chaos” to draw clicks should think about the distrust they are sowing.Or here’s another that’s a little more radical: Partisan leaders in Congress from both parties could preemptively agree on a power-sharing agreement between the two parties (rather than narrow majority rule) that would be triggered by a close and suspicious election, so it doesn’t create a fundamental crisis of government legitimacy.