Authored by Chris Andrew at Clarmond Wealth

It strikes me that one of the first actions following our super-duper new free trade agreement with the USA would be to export over to them a large box of British pencils.

On the 24th June 2016, by approximately 6am, we had managed to count 33,577,342 votes in the UK Brexit Referendum. These votes were counted by hand and we all voted by putting a simple cross in a box, using a trusty pencil.

Now, the voting in the Iowa Caucus has been closed for over 16 hours and, as of now, there has been no result. In fact only 1.9% of the votes have been tallied and are being reported. To put this into context in the last Iowa Caucus in 2016 approximately 171,517 votes were cast. It is both staggering and worrying that the world’s most powerful democracy cannot count.

What has happened?

Well it does not take much digging. The Democratic party were using an ‘App’ to count the votes; you cannot make it up but the tech company creating the app is called SHADOW, a name generally given to a Bond villain. To add to this Bondness, SHADOW is owned by another group called ACRONYM, whose CEO is Tara McGowan, Obama’s digital strategist. Gerard Niemira, who worked on Hilary’s 2016 campaign is CEO of SHADOW and finally David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, sits on the board of ACRONYM. Additionally, the Buttigeg and Biden campaigns paid SHADOW for work done. Strange coincidences indeed.

This sleuthing took me all of 20 minutes when you asked me to see what the heck happened in the Iowa cornfields. There are two explanations: it is a conspiracy of the Washington Consensus cabal denying Bernie a clean win and essentially muddying the waters…or it is total and utter incompetence of bringing an untested, non-transparent technology into the democratic process.

Either we have a FUBAR (an American acronym…look it up!) of American democracy, which is now as brazen as any Developing world dictator wannabe. Or technology has made the population so dependent that they have forgotten how to organize and count. We can all make our own decision on this but my suggestion to PM Boris would be export our election expertise to America - along with some free pencils.