Accused by me, that is. I accuse the Gephardt campaign of
deliberately lying about the claim that the Dean campaign is planning to have out-of-state people vote in the Iowa Caucus, in order to smear Dean and get media attention.
My thesis? Even if the accusation were true, the Dean campaign could not get enough out-of-state voters to alter the caucus results in a meaningful way without getting caught. Therefore, the risk-reward ratio is far too awful for a smart operator like Joe Trippi, or anyone in the Dean campaign with two clues to rub together.
Look at the numbers. About 100,000 people will attend the caucus. About 3500 Deaniacs have volunteered to go to Iowa. Some of that is for weekends before the caucus, so to be generous, let's say the Dean campaign has 3000 out-of-state volunteers in Iowa on caucus day. If ALL of them caucused illegally, it would change the results by 3%. Sure, it's a close race, but that ain't much.
Now to do this, they'd have to get all 3000 aware of the plan AND willing to cooperate. Despite the illusions of the SCLM and the other candidates, Dean's orbital mind control lasers aren't completely effective. Up to several dozen of those volunteers might break free of the hypnotic hold of Dean's stump speech, and be sufficiently offended by the idea to publicize it. Haven't you ever watched a 1950s zombie movie?
Worse, the only practical way the Dean campaign has to deal with so many volunteers is email, and the email going out to them is basically public record. So a plan to organize thousands of out-of-state volunteers to crash the party would be WELL documented. So how can they organize it? A secretive, cell-based plan going by word of mouth, using only volunteers that can be trusted to cheat the voting system and never admit to it.
Now we're back to a couple dozen. Maybe. The more volunteers, the more likely it is that someone will narc on Trippi.
So how much influence could a couple dozen party-crashers have on the Iowa Caucus? Not much, almost certainly not enough to matter. If it's within 1%, that's still a thousand votes.
Conclusion: A secret Dean campaign plan to crash the caucus is total nonsense. Additionally, the Gephardt campaign has advisors that can count to a thousand without using their toes, and they can do the math too. They simply made it up and spread it around, on the safe assumption that the SCLM won't apply three seconds of clear thought before attacking Dean for them.
That goes for not a few Kossacks as well.