App-ocalypse or Farmageddon? The best reason to date for ending the caucus system in Democratic primaries was offered by the Iowa Democratic Party last night:
One Democratic presidential candidate has won the Iowa caucuses. But because of an epic project management failure, we likely won't know who that winner is until sometime late Tuesday — at best. [snip]
Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez started the day by introducing a series of election reforms he said "empowered the grassroots and ensured our presidential nominating process reflects the will of the voters who will carry us to victory." By night's end, a hashtag was trending on Twitter calling for his resignation, amid numerous implausible but not disprovable conspiracy theories about how and why the Iowa caucuses went down the crapper.
There were a number of things that went wrong to lead to Monday's massive system meltdown.
Hours after the caucuses had ended, Democrats had failed to report more than 2% of results statewide. By comparison, 90% of precincts had reported by 11 p.m. Eastern time in 2016 (even though the tight race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders wasn't decided until the next morning). Around 2 a.m. Tuesday, the Iowa Democratic Party held a two-minute press call to say that no further results would be released until later in the day.
To protect against cybersecurity breaches, the DNC and the Iowa Democratic Party introduced an app that was to be used to tabulate results. It was kept under wraps until a few weeks before Monday's rollout, however, leaving precinct captains little time to be trained. Meanwhile, the failsafe phone lines used to call in results the old-fashioned way were also recently changed. [snip]
In what looks to be a massive and completely avoidable PR disaster, the app — which only needed to work for a couple of thousand people for a few hours on one day — appears to have been created by a group of Silicon Valley technocrats with roots in the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns. That doesn't mean anything sinister was afoot, of course, but it adds terrible optics to epic incompetence.
"The underlying data and paper trail is sound and [it] will simply take time to further report the results," a party spokeswoman said early on Tuesday morning. But the untested app wasn't the only reason for these delayed results. The DNC's own reforms likely slowed the process.
In an effort to offer more transparency after 2016's contentious primary campaign, the DNC required more rounds of votes to be reported. The Iowa Democratic Party's use of the Orwellian term "quality control" to describe the review of the reported results only helped to fuel conspiracy theories online, one of the very things the DNC's reforms sought to stamp out. Even more ironic, at least one Democratic campaign was quick to peddle evidence-free claims that will no doubt serve to erode trust in the country's electoral process — even as Iowa Democrats reported surprisingly flat caucus turnout on Monday. (our emphasis)Look, we love Iowa Democrats; our family has deep roots in Minnesota and Wisconsin. We love that Iowa Democrats take the trouble to go out on a winter night to caucus. But just because it's been that way forever doesn't mean it has to remain that way.
There are ample reasons why Iowa (and New Hampshire, too) should not even be the first in the nation, since they're not representative of the demographics of the party or America. The Democratic National Committee should have done something about this anomaly a long time ago; it now has a golden opportunity to develop real primary reforms that eliminate the archaic caucuses and provide a primary system that more legitimately represents the party and the nation. Otherwise, heads need to roll.
More broadly, we have one election, one chance to defeat the most dangerous person ever to hold office in America. To say we can't afford more clusterf*cks like this is almost an understatement.
BONUS: Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog has some thoughts, too, and a suggestion we would endorse.
BONUS II: Iowa political reporter David Yepsen agrees--
“This fiasco means the end of the caucuses as a significant American political event. The rest of the country was already losing patience with Iowa anyway and this cooks Iowa's goose. Frankly, it should,” Yepsen said. “The real winner tonight was Donald Trump, who got to watch his opponents wallow in a mess. A lot of good Democratic candidates and people who fought their hearts out here for ... nothing.
May it come to pass.“I expect Iowans will move themselves to kill it off by holding a primary, and let the state move to someplace behind New Hampshire along with other states.”
4 comments:
The Iowa caucus process is outdated and flawed. The reason it still exists, I suspect, is that it's a huge moneymaker for the state. The candidates arrive early and travel the state, the crowds come to the venues and diners and restaurants and shop and spend money. Iowa gets attention across the nation and they get to be heard.
There's nothing wrong with Iowans wanting to keep that going, but they dropped the ball and showed that it's time to give it up. Just because something is done “the way it's always been done”, it doesn't mean it can't be dumped in favor of smarter and more efficient methods.
donnah -- of all times for this to happen; it just plays into all kinds of negative memes and conspiracy theories that will be flogged by Democrats and, of course, Republicans. It's a Rube Goldberg system that was designed for an earlier time and is no longer viable.
It's user error. Local party officials are usually old people who can't manage to download an app that requires authorization. You have to register, get approved, respond to a confirmation email, find the app provider, download and install the app, learn how to login, and then work with a new user interface. For a lot of folks, that's too much.
Charles -- we've also heard that it was a "coding" problem in the reporting part of the app. In any event, anything or any technology that makes the process more complex is more likely to be affected by Murphy's Law.
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