‘A Systemwide Disaster’: How the Iowa Caucuses Melted Down

[DKW 86 7,411]

 

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‘A Systemwide Disaster’: How the Iowa Caucuses Melted Down

Unexplained “inconsistencies” in results, heated conference calls and firm denials of hacking left the contest in a strange state of almost suspended animation.

 

 

 

 

An official calculating the caucus precinct totals at Johnston Middle School in Iowa on Monday.Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times

By Shane Goldmacher and Nick Corasaniti

• Feb. 4, 2020Updated 6:59 a.m. ET
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DES MOINES — Sean Bagniewski had seen the problems coming.

It wasn’t so much that the new app that the Iowa Democratic Party had planned to use to report its caucus results didn’t work. It was that people were struggling to even log in or download it in the first place. After all, there had never been any app-specific training for his many precinct chairs.

So last Thursday Mr. Bagniewski, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Polk County, Iowa’s most populous, decided to scrap the app entirely, instructing his precinct chairs to simply call in the caucus results as they had always done.

The only problem was, when the time came during Monday’s caucuses, those precinct chairs could not connect with party leaders via phone. Mr. Bagniewski instructed his executive director to take pictures of the results with her smartphone and drive over to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters to deliver them in person. She was turned away without explanation, he said.

“I don’t even know if they know what they don’t know,” Mr. Bagniewski said of the state party shortly before 2 a.m. on Tuesday.

 

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It was a surreal opening act for the 2020 campaign that included unexplained “inconsistencies” in results that were not released to the public, heated conference calls with campaigns that were hung up on by the state party, firm denials of any kind of hacking and a presidential primary left in a strange state of almost suspended animation.

“A systemwide disaster,” said Derek Eadon, a former Iowa Democratic Party chairman.

Amid the chaos and confusion, there were conflicting candidate speeches declaring various degrees of victory, as Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign released its own set of favorable partial results, and multiple campaigns hoped that the mess would not lessen the eventual impact of what they said appeared to be a disappointing first test for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

 

Problems in Reporting the Iowa Results

 

The caucus

Caucusgoers assemble into groups to

indicate support for candidates.

Submitting the results

Caucus chairs fill out a

worksheet with results.

The results could be

reported one of two ways.

+ –

× ÷

Via mobile phone app

Many caucus chairs had difficulty downloading the app, did not try or had other problems.

Via phone hotline

Many caucus chairs called the hotline, overloading the phone lines. Unlike past years, there were three sets of numbers that were reported, instead of one.

By Keith Collins and Lazaro Gamio

“Any campaign saying they won or putting out incomplete numbers is contributing to the chaos and misinformation,” Joe Rospars, the chief strategist for Senator Elizabeth Warren, scolded on Twitter. Two tweets and one minute earlier, he had written, “It’s a very close race among the top three candidates (Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg) and Biden came a distant fourth.”

With no actual results, the only clear loser was Iowa and its increasingly precarious caucuses. For the third consecutive presidential cycle, the results here are riddled with questions, if not doubt. First it was the Republicans, when Mitt Romney was initially declared the winner in 2008 before that was later reversed, and then the Democrats suffered when a virtual tie between Hillary Clinton and Mr. Sanders in 2016 set off a number of rule changes that culminated in the 2020 debacle.

 

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The evening had begun well enough. Iowa Democrats said turnout was strong and the caucuses themselves — held across more than 1,600 precincts from the Missouri River to the Mississippi River — had mostly proceeded smoothly. For the first time, there would be not just one result recorded but three: the initial alignment of caucusgoers, the realignment of those who were with candidates below 15 percent support, and then the final delegates won at each site.

 

The added detail was the result of complaints from four years ago about the opaqueness of Mr. Sanders’s narrow loss in the Iowa delegate chase to Mrs. Clinton.

 

 

 

 

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Caucusgoers at Johnston Middle School filled out preference cards for their first-choice candidates. Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times

Some precinct leaders said they had filed their results on Monday with little struggle. Jerry Depew, the county chair in rural Pocahontas, said he had called in his results after a five-minute hold, at 8:05 p.m.

But soon the party phone lines were completely jammed.

“The app wasn’t included in the chair training that everyone was required to take,” said Zach Simonson, the Democratic Party chair in Wapello County.

“When you have an app that you’re sending out to 1,700 people and many of them might be newer to apps and that kind of stuff, it might have been worth doing a couple months’ worth of testing,” said Mr. Bagniewski, the Polk County chairman.

 

Unlike a primary run by the state government, caucuses are party affairs and they are powered by the dedication of a small army of volunteers in every city, town and hamlet of a state.

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Mr. Simonson said that he had spent nearly three hours trying to report results on Monday. At one point, he received one call from a state party official who was “in a very loud room and screamed at me about wanting a precinct ID number but couldn’t hear my reply over the din in the room.”

“While I was talking to him,” Mr. Simonson said in an email, “my call on the other line, holding for 90 minutes, was answered and hung up.”

Mr. Depew, who had filed shortly after 8 p.m., said he had received a call from the state party almost three hours later asking for the results he had long since filed. “I said, ‘I already reported nearly three hours ago.’ She took my word for it and moved on without explaining the apparent snafus,” he said.

But those delays and confusion did not explain why the state party had released zero results — including from the precincts that had successfully filed their results either via phone or the app. The party said at first that it was conducting “quality control” efforts.

At 10:26 p.m., the Iowa Democratic Party issued a longer statement.

“We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results,” it said. “This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.”

Around that time, the state party tried to brief the campaigns in a phone call. It did not go well. Party officials mostly reiterated their public statements: that the delays were related to issuing three numbers per precinct for the first time. Party officials hung up after being pressed for more by the campaigns, according to two people on the call.

 

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Soon after, the Biden campaign sent a sharply worded letter to the state party that said “acute failures are occurring statewide.”

 

 

 

 

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Officials added up the number of supporters for each candidate at the precinct on a worksheet.Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times

“The app that was intended to relay caucus results to the party failed; the party’s backup telephonic reporting system likewise has failed,” wrote Mr. Biden’s general counsel, Dana Remus. “Now, we understand that caucus chairs are attempting to — and, in many cases, failing to — report results telephonically to the party.”

The campaign asked to see the “methods of quality control” being used by the party and requested “an opportunity to respond, before any official results are released.”

Even before Monday, there were other concerns with the app itself, which was developed by a private firm called Shadow. Cybersecurity experts worried that it had not been vetted, tested at scale, or even shown to independent experts before being introduced in Iowa.

Christopher C. Krebs, the director of the Homeland Security Department’s cybersecurity agency, said late Monday that the mobile app had not been vetted or evaluated by the agency.

The candidates decided not to wait for any results, one by one giving variations of a victory speech, beginning with Senator Amy Klobuchar, though none were quite as bold in their proclamations of success as Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind.

“Tonight, an improbable hope became an undeniable reality,” Mr. Buttigieg declared, as a campaign spokesman spent the evening posting screen shots of precincts where the candidate had won.

 

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The Sanders campaign was then even bolder, releasing shortly after midnight a set of “internal caucus numbers” that it said accounted for 40 percent of the state’s precincts.

“We believe firmly that our supporters worked too hard for too long to have the results of that work delayed,” wrote Jeff Weaver, a senior Sanders adviser.

At 1 a.m., the chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, Troy Price, arranged a call with the news media, though he took no questions. Mr. Price issued a statement saying that he planned to release the results later on Tuesday and that the delay was because “the integrity of our process and the results have and always will be our top priority.”

He spoke for less than a minute.

“We are validating every piece of data we have against our paper trail. That system is taking longer than expected,” he said, “but it’s in place to ensure we are eventually able to report results with full confidence.”

By then, most of the candidates were wheels up and on the way to New Hampshire.

 

Saw the same thing in 2016...Bernie won, the DNC didnt like him winning, so they refused to give the results until they had massaged them till they liked them. How, in 2020, with all the technology at your disposal, can you screw up something so simple as a vote count? There are literally dozens and dozens of nationwide companies that do this every single day for focus groups, top ten lists, consumer preference, even real mlive voter results in WA, TN, and elsewhere, etc. 

With all the crapola about rigged elections, and foreign influence, with all the Democrat Email Hack Damage from 2016 how could you allow this to happen? I, for one, will have a hard time believing anything posted this late. 

[bigbird 60,368]

https://9to5mac.com/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-app/

Iowa caucus app: no security vetting, no testing, no training, says NYT report

[AUDub 11,131]

10 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

 

Saw the same thing in 2016...Bernie won, the DNC didnt like him winning, so they refused to give the results until they had massaged them till they liked them. How, in 2020, with all the technology at your disposal, can you screw up something so simple as a vote count? There are literally dozens and dozens of nationwide companies that do this every single day for focus groups, top ten lists, consumer preference, etc. 

Hanlon's Razor is applicable here. It is absurdly irresponsible to be floating malice.

[DKW 86 7,411]

 

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Tech firm started by Clinton campaign veterans is linked to Iowa caucus reporting debacle

An app created by a tech firm run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign is taking heat for the unprecedented delay in reporting Democratic caucus results from Iowa.

The firm behind the app reportedly is Shadow, an affiliate of ACRONYM, a Democratic nonprofit founded in 2017 “to educate, inspire, register, and mobilize voters,” according to its website. Shadow started out as Groundbase, a tech developer co-founded by Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, who worked for the tech team on Clinton’s campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination.

Niemira had previously worked at kiva.org, a nonprofit that makes loans to entrepreneurs and others in the developing world, and Davis had spent eight years as an engineer at Google. ACRONYM’s founder and CEO is Tara McGowan, a former journalist and digital producer with President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign.

Designed to modernize a system that relied on precinct chairs phoning in their results, Shadow’s caucus app was seen as “a potential target for early election interference,” according to the Des Moines Register.

Instead, results from Monday’s caucuses could not be transmitted to Iowa party headquarters and the delays increased. Results are not expected until later Tuesday.

“We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results. In addition to the tech systems being used to tabulate results, we are also using photos of results and a paper trail to validate that all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report,” Iowa Democratic Party communications director Mandy McClure said in a written statement released late Monday night.

“This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.”

Shadow did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment.

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ACRONYM acquired Shadow in January 2019 to function as its tech-development arm. “When a light is shining, Shadows are a constant companion,” its website says. “We see ourselves as building a long-term, side-by-side ‘Shadow’ of tech infrastructure to the Democratic Party and the progressive community at large.”

In a statement late Monday night, ACRONYM distanced itself from Shadow, saying it was not a tech provider and did not have any information about what went wrong in Iowa.

In an interview with NPR in January, Troy Price, chairman of the Iowa state Democratic Party, declined to say whether it had been tested for vulnerabilities by any independent experts, suggesting the secrecy around it helped to keep it secure from cyberattacks. The state party subsequently told the Des Moines Register it had been independently tested.

The state Democratic parties of Iowa and Nevada each paid around $60,000 to Shadow, according to Federal Election Commission disclosures. Nevada’s Democratic caucuses are set for Feb. 22.

Back in Iowa, Dallas County Democratic Party Chair Bryce Smith told The Times that the app left many precincts unable to report their results digitally, which left the state party overwhelmed.

“I have people who have been on hold for 20, 30, 40 minutes” with the state party, Smith told The Times.

Among Shadow’s clients is Pete Buttegieg’s presidential campaign, which paid $42,500 to the firm in July 2019 for “software rights and subscriptions,” according to disclosures to the FEC. A spokesman for the campaign says the payment was for a service used to send text messages to voters. The campaigns of Joe Biden and Kirsten Gillibrand, who withdrew from the race last year, also made smaller payments to Shadow.

 

 

[AUDub 11,131]

7 minutes ago, bigbird said:

https://9to5mac.com/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-app/

Iowa caucus app: no security vetting, no testing, no training, says NYT report

The good thing is that the effective fallback of hard paper records is still a thing. 

Some moron got too big for their britches and moved to hastily implement an app without proper vetting for the sake of novelty. 

[DKW 86 7,411]

Just now, AUDub said:

The good thing is that the effective fallback of hard paper records is still a thing. 

Some moron got too big for their britches and moved to hastily implement an app without proper vetting for the sake of novelty. 

No, the DNC GUARANTEED there was no vetting nescessary...

[DKW 86 7,411]

5 minutes ago, AUDub said:

The good thing is that the effective fallback of hard paper records is still a thing. 

Some moron got too big for their britches and moved to hastily implement an app without proper vetting for the sake of novelty. 

What paper controls? If there were paper controls, why do we have no results yet 12 hours later. 
Paper results do not take 12 hours to process...Nowhere in America does it take 12+ hours to count results. 

There are off-the-shelf apps working 100% effectively that were passed over for an app that was developed by FOHRC. 
Now, there are huge issues with it. The Iowa Party refused to accept called in results, and apparently paper results as well.

[AUDub 11,131]

5 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

No, the DNC GUARANTEED there was no vetting nescessary...

This is the IDP's - an organization of mostly volunteers - rodeo, I'm afraid. 

One silver lining is that this cluster may mean the end if caucuses like this, and Iowa, which is hardly representative of the US at large by populace, may get bumped back. 

[AUDub 11,131]

6 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

What paper controls? If there were paper controls, why do we have no results yet 12 hours later. 
Paper results do not take 12 hours to process...Nowhere in America does it take 12+ hours to count results. 

There are off-the-shelf apps working 100% effectively that were passed over for an app that was developed by FOHRC. 
Now, there are huge issues with it. The Iowa Party refused to accept called in results, and apparently paper results as well.

It's on paper, and every single attendee hears the announced final numbers for their caucus site before they leave. Every one! It would be virtually impossible to fix without people screaming foul.

[DKW 86 7,411]

https://dnyuz.com/2020/02/04/a-systemwide-disaster-how-the-iowa-caucuses-melted-down/

Turns out Precincts scrapped the app Thursday of last week...WTH????

If the app was scrapped, why all the problems with results, just call the results in. the IDP would not accept the calls, etc. 

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DES MOINES — Sean Bagniewski had seen the problems coming.

It wasn’t so much that the new app that the Iowa Democratic Party had planned to use to report its caucus results didn’t work. It was that people were struggling to even log in or download it in the first place. After all, there had never been any app-specific training for his many precinct chairs.

So last Thursday Mr. Bagniewski, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Polk County, Iowa’s most populous, decided to scrap the app entirely, instructing his precinct chairs to simply call in the caucus results as they had always done.

The only problem was, when the time came during Monday’s caucuses, those precinct chairs could not connect with party leaders via phone. Mr. Bagniewski instructed his executive director to take pictures of the results with her smartphone and drive over to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters to deliver them in person. She was turned away without explanation, he said.

“I don’t even know if they know what they don’t know,” Mr. Bagniewski said of the state party shortly before 2 a.m. on Tuesday.

 

 

[DKW 86 7,411]

Iowa:
Someone didnt like the outcome of the Register Poll, it was never reported.
Someone didnt like the outcome of the Caucuses, they are not reported.

Anyone else seeing a pattern here?

[AUDub 11,131]

1 minute ago, DKW 86 said:

Iowa:
Someone didnt like the outcome of the Register Poll, it was never reported.
Someone didnt like the outcome of the Caucuses, they are not reported.

Anyone else seeing a pattern here?

Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug. 

[DKW 86 7,411]

1 minute ago, AUDub said:

Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug. 

Bro, we have had 3+ years of confirmation bias from the MSM and HRC Campaign...

You see no problems when results are denied the public? We need transparency, and honesty. Not coverups and darkness,,,

[DKW 86 7,411]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/04/joe-biden-flopped-badly-iowa

If you’re the type of person who thinks the Democratic party is a creaking, incompetent entity whose leadership needs overthrowing, the Iowa caucuses certainly validated your point of view. None of us knew who would win, but we had at least expected a result. We didn’t get one, at least not on caucus night. State Democratic party officials announced that due to “quality control” issues, release of the result would be indefinitely delayed. On a conference call with representatives of the candidates, party officials hung up the phone when asked when the totals would be released.

So what do we know? Well, one thing we can say confidently is that “frontrunner” Joe Biden flopped. There were places where Biden didn’t even meet the 15% threshold needed to maintain viability from the first round to the second round – at one caucus site, the attorney general of Iowa had to switch from Biden to Buttigieg when Biden was disqualified. It explains why Biden’s surrogate John Kerry was heard on the phone the other day asking whether it would be possible for him to enter the race at the last minute to save the Democratic party from being conquered by Sanders.

Internal numbers released by the Sanders campaign, showing results from 40% of caucus sites, showed Sanders winning with approximately 30% of the vote, Pete Buttigieg coming in second with 25%, Elizabeth Warren third with 21%, and Joe Biden a very distant fourth with 12%. If those numbers match the ultimate totals, they are great for Sanders and absolutely horrific for Biden. Sanders will have kicked the crap out of the frontrunner, Barack Obama’s former vice-president and the man most favored to win the nomination. It would be a stunning upset.

[AUDub 11,131]

10 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

Bro, we have had 3+ years of confirmation bias from the MSM and HRC Campaign...

You see no problems when results are denied the public? We need transparency, and honesty. Not coverups and darkness,,,

Delayed is not denied, and it's far from the first time this has happened to either party. Remember when Romney was declared the winner in Iowa a few years back?

Not everything is a shadowy conspiracy theory. Sometimes it's merely incompetence. 

[bigbird 60,368]

14 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

We need transparency, and honesty.

Wasn't this touted to be the most transparent caucus/voting in history?

[bigbird 60,368]

4 minutes ago, AUDub said:

Sometimes it's merely incompetence. 

Sadly we have to hope its incompetence...

[DKW 86 7,411]

Watch how Politico Talks about it:

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'It’s a total meltdown': Confusion seizes Iowa as officials struggle to report results

DES MOINES, Iowa — A technical meltdown in Iowa Monday night set off bedlam in the critical first contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, triggering competing claims of victory and stoking doubts about the legitimacy of the eventual outcome.

No results had been reported by midnight Eastern, and two campaigns told POLITICO that after a conference call with the Iowa Democratic Party, they didn’t expect any returns until Tuesday morning at the earliest

Candidates stepped into the void. Pete Buttigieg went first by claiming victory — misleadingly, in the view of Bernie Sanders, whose campaign responded by releasing unofficial figures showing his strength. Amy Klobuchar also joined in by citing unverified results she said demonstrated a robust performance

 

The biggest "winner" might have been Joe Biden. (WTH?) According to the Iowa entrance poll, he was hovering close to the viability threshold of 15 percent statewide. But the questions surrounding the vote-counting served to obscure a potentially poor performance. The former vice president, facing potentially ugly headlines going into New Hampshire and beyond, couldn't get out of Iowa fast enough.

“We’re going to walk out of here with our share of delegates,” Biden declared to a packed room on the Drake University campus. “It’s on to New Hampshire!”

Conversely, it might have delivered a blow to Sanders and Buttigieg, who appeared on track to do well in the state. Whether the victor turns out to be Sanders or Buttigieg or someone else, that candidate was denied the chance to give an election night victory speech to a nationwide audience — a springboard heading into New Hampshire

 

So Politico is saying: "...by not having an embarrassing defeat talked about nationally, Biden is the real winner in Iowa."

[AUDub 11,131]

16 minutes ago, bigbird said:

Sadly we have to hope its incompetence...

Again, highly irresponsible to be floating malice here. 

And I am willing to bet Trump will hammer the malfeasance card during the SOTU. 

[AUDub 11,131]

21 minutes ago, bigbird said:

Wasn't this touted to be the most transparent caucus/voting in history?

Again, it's all on paper. It sucks to have a delay, but there will be accurate results reported eventually. 

[AUDub 11,131]

29 minutes ago, AUDub said:

 Remember when Romney was declared the winner in Iowa a few years back?

Speaking of that. 

 

[Brad_ATX 13,654]

15 minutes ago, AUDub said:

Speaking of that. 

 

It's as if a weird way of counting votes (caucusing) can somehow get screwed up really easily.  Who knew?!

[DKW 86 7,411]

Primaries and Caucuses have been going on for hundreds of years. Caucuses were the old primaries. Funny, they didnt have the problems we do now...

[TexasTiger 12,810]

10 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

Primaries and Caucuses have been going on for hundreds of years. Caucuses were the old primaries. Funny, they didnt have the problems we do now...

Who knows how accurate a system like this has been in the past? 

[DKW 86 7,411]

46 minutes ago, TexasTiger said:

Who knows how accurate a system like this has been in the past? 

This is actually a good point. They must have at least appeared to most as accurate tho.