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The naivety is in adding error-checking on top of a caucus process with a notoriously complex set of rules that have been executed by hand, by humans at over a
by dkarl 7y ago
The naivety is in adding error-checking on top of a caucus process with a notoriously complex set of rules that have been executed by hand, by humans at over a thousand different precincts for many decades, and then hold up the results when -- shocker -- you realize a large number of precincts are reporting results that show evidence of mistakes or inconsistent interpretation of the rules.
Any commercial software company with thousands of data entry users would regard it as a massive mistake to suddenly, overnight, begin rejecting all data that wasn't in compliance with a complex set of rules that most people can't explain. You'd bring a smoothly running business to a grinding, embarrassing halt.
Of course all the individual precinct officials whose result were rejected are going to blame the app. Why not? The makers of the app didn't have a mandate to fix the caucus process. And of course when people's accuracy and competence are called into question they will do everything they can to discredit the source.
I don't know if that's what happened, but it's consistent with what we're observing: the state office is saying they're trying to resolve inconsistencies in the returns, and the precincts are blaming the app.
The right thing to do would have been to use software to measure the prevailing level of data quality and compliance with the state official's interpretation of the rules, and decide later whether to do anything about it in 2024, if ever.
- Balgair 7y agoAmerican party nominations have been, are currently, and will forever be a total Charlie Foxtrot. The Democratic 1860 Conventions were so bad they decided to put up two candidates, had to do it over a few times, had many walkouts, and effectively seceded Lincoln the Presidency and engulfed the nation in war as a result. It was so bad it literally was a cause of the Civil War. The 1912 Republican Convention literally split the party, with the fisticuffs and black eyes to prove it. Edumnd Morris has a good bit on that one and the hijinks, corruption, vote-selling, and smoke filled rooms in his Theodore Rex series. To us today, it's ghastly. I think it was the 1952 National Conventions that really exposed to the public what a mess it all is, as they were the first ones to be televised. During the process people intentionally lit newspapers on fire in order to cause chaos (my memory is a bit fuzzy here though). The 1964 Republican convention at SF's Cow Palace, dubbed Conservative Woodstock, was more of a Nazi rally than anything else. Reporters had racial and sexist slurs screamed at them until they ran for their lives. The state caucuses are a reflection of these conventions and America itself; drunken, insane, corrupt, spectacle.
- dkarl 7y agoI don't know why you're getting downvoted. I think people inside the apparatus of both parties see the arcane and chaotic aspects of the process as their chance to put their fingers on the scales, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's what this brouhaha in Iowa is about -- a fight between people at the precinct level who want to maintain their power to influence the results by interpreting the rules this way or that, and people at the state level who want to iron out these "irregularities" (probably while maintaining any power they have at the state level to perpetrate similar shenanigans.) The public can and should put pressure on the parties to adopt more legible and transparent processes.