12 ms·

Iowa Caucuses, the Blob, and the Democratic Party Cartel

112 points by simonpure 7y ago

silenussays 7y ago
Best line: "It's not a conspiracy, it's a community". That sure can be applied to a lot of things in this world.
- rob74 7y ago
  When seen from the inside, it's a community. When seen from the outside, it might look to some like a conspiracy...
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  Including the Mafia. If only Rico laws were applied to people who aren't a bit too tanned to be really white.
CWuestefeld 7y ago
The root cause of the Iowa fiasco is a nonprofit corporation called ACRONYM, which owns the technology company Shadow, Inc. It's not at all clear to me that this is the case. I mean, sure, there are obviously big problems with the app's design and implementation. But there are ample signs of deeper problems with the customer (and indeed, TFA alludes to some of it). The fact that the Party insisted on keeping specifics about the app secret until the last minute was the first big red flag to me. With the customer making such a demand about a product that's intended to be widely distributed with zero ramp-up time, they had at least two strikes against them from the start. Further mess-ups outside the app development, like using the same phone lines for support and for reporting, are mistakes that don't obviously fall on the shoulders of the developer. The customer - the Iowa Democratic Party - probably needs to bear at least part of the blame for this. It's true that an experienced developer might have given their customer better guidance, but that doesn't absolve the Party from these mistakes.
- claudeganon 7y ago
  I’m not sure we can even distinguish the entities involved in this case. The head of the Iowa Democratic Party was partying with the ACRONYM’s CEO just before the election. She is married to a Buttigeig staffer. Her husband’s brother is comms director for Buttigeig and was tweeting out log in PINs during the election. And of course the whole ACRONYM operation is wrapped up with Democratic Party dark money. https://mobile.twitter.com/taraemcg/status/1223990978127724546 https://mobile.twitter.com/taraemcg/status/12239909781277245... https://mobile.twitter.com/bhalle87/status/1224558925946793985 https://mobile.twitter.com/bhalle87/status/12245589259467939... https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-a-dem-dark-money-group-is-invading-the-news https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-a-dem-dark-money-group-is-...
  - matchbok 7y ago
    Yep, the DNC planned a whole conspiracy for.... Iowa.
    - sixQuarks 7y ago
      You’re naive if you think they WONT try to screw Bernie again
      - ianai 7y ago
        Big claims require big evidence. It’s dangerous to embrace the worst case scenario like corruption with open arms and requiring little evidence. People are doing it all the time now and it’s how the trolls win.
        buzzkillington 7y ago
        Surely we can blame Russia for this, since there's no evidence that just means the Russians have been extra careful with the hacking.
        sixQuarks 7y ago
        umm, it's pretty obvious if you dig into it just a little bit, and don't just rely on mainstream news. start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Committee_email_leak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...
zaroth 7y ago
There’s an extremely interesting and important discussion to be had around what happened with an App in Iowa, but TFA seems like the wrong plank to walk off of to have it. Maybe one day we will have an honest and true post mortem of what happened on Monday. Reports have been conflicting and non-sensical. No one that I can find has managed to actually show the app in question in detail, what numbers were meant to be reported, and how it actually all fell apart. I’ve heard explanations ranging from caucus chairs unable to login to the app, to the result reports coming out of the app being corrupted. Days later we’re still at only 70% precincts reporting and a race still too close to call. For what was apparently, a fairly low turnout event. We’re talking about a web form collecting like 6 integer values from 1,765 precincts, right?
- giansegato 7y ago
  That's exactly what I'm not getting. Everybody is discussing scalability problems, but as far as I've seen it all comes down to ~2K users and ~2K consequent form submissions. I can understand juniority, but here even a kid could've handled this kind of "scale"
- kjaftaedi 7y ago
  Even blaming the app is wrong in my opinion. They had backup plans in place where the precincts would just phone their results in. (as you would expect) ... except nobody was answering the phones. They were interviewing people on TV who were trying to report their precincts results over the phone, and were interviewing them while on hold. I remember one guy saying he's been waiting for hours for someone to answer. The app is a scapegoat because people are willing to accept "testing in production" as something that just happens, instead of what in reality should be considered gross negligence.
- jellicle 7y ago
  Yep. They've obviously had much longer than needed to simply report the values via paper and telephone calls, so the only reason you don't know those numbers now is that the party possesses them and is declining to release them. I believe it's perfectly legitimate to speculate about why the party might be declining to release them and to make adverse inferences. The time delay granted by claiming "technical problems" has been exceeded.
SuperFerret 7y ago
Meanwhile, it is now legal for the President to rig the election. Great year so far.
Proziam 7y ago
Bias Check: I didn't vote Bernie in 2016, I won't be voting Bernie in 2020, and I can honestly say there's not a single politician running that would actually represent my opinions and values. "It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a community." I don't know. I have serious doubts about whether or not we're seeing foul-play here. What we know for sure is that the app in question was partially funded by a(at least one) candidate. Essentially, a candidate gave money to the system that counted their votes. The company behind the app was founded by people tied to the Democratic 'establishment' (specifically, Hillary Clinton). And, as far as I can tell, the Democratic party has done everything in their power to ensure the candidate with the most name recognition and popular support in the race (Bernie Sanders) isn't their nominee. From what I have seen thus far this cycle, and from what I saw in 2016, I can't help but be suspicious.
- arcticfox 7y ago
  The baffling thing to me about so many conspiracy theories from Sanders' camp is that the delay hurt Buttigieg far worse than Sanders. Sanders is fine with no news from Iowa, the next primary is in his backyard and he has nationwide name recognition. Buttigieg on the other hand needs Iowa to be huge for him, and this fiasco certainly hurt that strategy.
  - beeftime 7y ago
    The idea that the delay(s) hurt Buttigieg in any way is a profound misreading of the situation. Iowa has a small number of delegates, and it's only important in as much as it creates momentum for the winner going into the next three states. If they released the vote totals on time and Bernie won, that would have given his campaign momentum, which could have lead (still might) to a NH blowout. Instead, Pete got to "declare victory" twice -- night-of, and again after the 60% release. Now it really doesn't matter if they release the results and Bernie is shown to have won, because we're already multiple news cycles away from caucus night and most people aren't really paying attention, so it's going to be hard for Sanders to capture any momentum, if it's shown he has won. Pete, on the other hand, got a significant NH bump from the IA results in the latest polls. I think the only way it's hurt Pete is through IDP incompetence, where to most Americans (who hate a cheater and love a conspiracy theory) it looks, for lack of a better term, extremely shady. It's also fired up Bernie's base of die-hards, who are now on the warpath (or even more so) for the early states
huherto 7y ago
Please consider this. - In software engineering it is notoriously difficult to distinguish between capable and incapable companies/individuals. You basically need a very capable person to make the evaluation. But who chooses the evaluator ? - Even a capable company can screw up by no putting the right people in the project. - Even one person in a capable team can derail a project. - A project needs time to ramp up, go from alpha testing to beta testing to production. A project that goes from dev to production in one night has 10x the risk of a regular project. - 60k is very little money for such a risky project. - Finally, The obligatory don't ever, ever trust voting software https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
- LukeEF 7y ago
  The obligatory xkcd! They should have known, right?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ianai 7y ago
This is clearly not an HN appropriate topic from the comments alone. This thread is devolving into a mixture of the worst possible interpretations of what happened with outright lies and misleading representations being used to fuel FUD.
- Shivetya 7y ago
  welcome to the shit show that has been present for quite awhile. at least this article up and declares its political while too many are slipped in under the covers and are very easily traced back to one campaign's or another talking points. just flag every article and maybe enough others will join in and we can get back to pretending to having an agnostic view on this site
skmurphy 7y ago
key paragraph: "In this moment in history, the network of institutions that comprise the Democratic Party, from cable news channels to law firms to campaign operative networks to Silicon Valley lobbying outposts like Facebook and Google, are hollow and obviously incompetent." This seems to be hyperbole, but I am not familiar with Matt Stoller so I reserved judgement and read a number of the back issues of his newsletter (archived at no charge on the site at https://mattstoller.substack.com/ https://mattstoller.substack.com/ ). I came across this https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/airplanes-and-accounting-games-the https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/airplanes-and-accounting-... which was written in December and correctly predicts the subsequent collapse of Boeing. Both articles are well written and insightful, the analysis is not from a political perspective but from a careful review of governance models and the impact of incentives on behavior.
- ianai 7y ago
  Well you won me over. I do think this guy is trying to honestly shed light on the powers of influence and concentration at work in the industry at large. I’m dubious though about the value of this particular article.
34679 7y ago
Definition of conspiracy 1 : the act of conspiring together Definition of conspire 1a : to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement b : scheme 2 : to act in harmony toward a common end Following the above, a conspiracy can be "the act of working in harmony toward a common end". Otherwise known as Politics. Whether there's a conspiracy here isn't up for debate; by definition a political party is a conspiracy. What's debatable is if they conspired illegally.
tptacek 7y ago
Why is Matt Stoller credible on this topic? Is there evidence he has better sourcing than a book he once read and a bunch of Google searches?
- dmix 7y ago
  Just sounds like some vague connections thrown together that happens to match the thesis of his book. Yawn.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    Which I am happy to blow off when he's writing about random corporations but less sanguine about when his supposed authority on a political topic is the basis for a partisan political debate --- one rooted in conspiracy theories, no less --- on HN.
blhack 7y ago
I feel really bad for the people who made this thing. It looks like it was mostly interns/people at their first job out of a bootcamp. It was a mess, sure. My first major project was probably a mess too, except my "mess" would have been looking at a display and going "huh?", not being accused of trying to undermine democracy.
- joering2 7y ago
  Its a classical example of government waste and corruption. Some shady company collected millions while interns took blame for their first app not being robust and at the level of banking app. Sadly the winner of this fiasco is Trump. It was similar with Obamacare website. Done to the tune of $5 billion dollars (!!) it was mostly prepared by IT corporations located in India, the source code is/was terrible with jQuery hosted on some third-party CDN, it was/is a disaster.
  - jellicle 7y ago
    As this caucus was administered and paid for by the Iowa Democratic Party, a private corporation, this is not a classical example of government waste and corruption, unless you're making the subsidiary argument that government shouldn't farm out or privatize essential functions like elections, which I would agree with.
  - teucris 7y ago
    > Its a classical example of government waste and corruption. I agree on the corruption part, but elected governments had very little to do with this. To me that’s a double edged sword - the caucus process could be an independent expression of the will of the people (in theory anyway) but it also isn’t subject to proper scrutiny nor required to be a transparent process.
- silenussays 7y ago
  The thing that blows my mind is that they only spend around $60k developing it. Steyer and Bloomberg have spent 400 million dollars combined on ads in South Carolina. Couldn't any of the several billionaires that support the Democrats have kicked down a couple hundred grand for this at least? Even Epstein randomly handed out 100k checks to profs at MIT. It's not that much money for these people.
Judson 7y ago
To me, the Iowa Caucus Fiasco™️ is best explained by incompetence and embarrassment. A bug in the app caused it to fail, call centers overwhelmed, and a bunch of people who had been at the caucus for hours probably tried to take the reporting into their own hands, and caused even more delays. Verifying the results that were scribbled on an undated piece of paper by 1600+ volunteers is not an easy task. [Esp after the fact, when the whole verification was centered around username / pw / 2fa / + pin, which may have not been readily accessible for call-center use]. The Des Moine Register poll was scrapped for less, which is why it feels like a cover-up. Not because of any candidate bias, but because the caucus probably needs to be redone for the results to be credible under scrutiny, or nullified entirely, which would be quite an embarrassment.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
leto_ii 7y ago
It’s always been a bit of a puzzle for me to define just what the Democratic Party is. There are no formal membership dues, and registration varies by state. Candidates can sometimes run for the party nomination without being a member As a non-American this kind of stuff has always been a bit bewildering for me. Why is such opacity accepted in the electoral/political process? Doesn't this always risk shifting power to unknown and unaccountable individuals? Doesn't this muddying of waters allow for all sorts of hidden conflicts of interest?
- DanTheManPR 7y ago
  Part of the reason is that the framers of the US constitution hated parties, and seemed to take a "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" approach. With no backbone of written law to fall back on, US political parties only rely on their own rules as an organization of people. All the problems you described do affect them, and they used to be even more exclusive and opaque. The candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are fruits of the opening up of parties, effectively allowing takeovers by determined blocks of people.
- LarryDarrell 7y ago
  For the most part, most of our rules and traditions are there to make sure the poor and people of color stay disenfranchised.
LukeEF 7y ago
I mean srsly people, has nobody read the relevant xkcd? It was all so clear: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
blazespin 7y ago
Gods, why not just take a picture of the voting sheet and send it in. Iowa only has about 1700 voting districts? I could data entry that myself in about 2 hours. Split the work among 10 people, and you'd have it done in 12 minutes.
- elicash 7y ago
  My guess is either (a) they're hand-counting all the paper backups, and/or (b) campaigns are chiming in and confirming or disputing results before the IDP makes the result public, which means more time for folks to weigh in and more fact-gathering before the public knows the results. And that while this wasn't the plan, the initial things going wrong caused such distrust in the process they felt this was necessary.
scottlocklin 7y ago
Funny Matt is usually a straight shooter but didn't mention Tara McGowan (CEO of Acronym; it's on linkedin) is married to Buttigieg senior staffer Michael Halle. Maybe he didn't notice. https://www.axios.com/pete-buttigieg-michael-halle-senior-staff-36f664e9-0099-4eb1-a01b-1f07cc488709.html https://www.axios.com/pete-buttigieg-michael-halle-senior-st...
leto_ii 7y ago
Does anybody know why this story was flagged? :-S

112 points by simonpure 7y ago

silenussays 7y ago

Best line: "It's not a conspiracy, it's a community". That sure can be applied to a lot of things in this world.

rob74 7y ago
When seen from the inside, it's a community. When seen from the outside, it might look to some like a conspiracy...
buzzkillington 7y ago
Including the Mafia. If only Rico laws were applied to people who aren't a bit too tanned to be really white.

CWuestefeld 7y ago

The root cause of the Iowa fiasco is a nonprofit corporation called ACRONYM, which owns the technology company Shadow, Inc. It's not at all clear to me that this is the case. I mean, sure, there are obviously big problems with the app's design and implementation. But there are ample signs of deeper problems with the customer (and indeed, TFA alludes to some of it). The fact that the Party insisted on keeping specifics about the app secret until the last minute was the first big red flag to me. With the customer making such a demand about a product that's intended to be widely distributed with zero ramp-up time, they had at least two strikes against them from the start. Further mess-ups outside the app development, like using the same phone lines for support and for reporting, are mistakes that don't obviously fall on the shoulders of the developer. The customer - the Iowa Democratic Party - probably needs to bear at least part of the blame for this. It's true that an experienced developer might have given their customer better guidance, but that doesn't absolve the Party from these mistakes.

claudeganon 7y ago
I’m not sure we can even distinguish the entities involved in this case. The head of the Iowa Democratic Party was partying with the ACRONYM’s CEO just before the election. She is married to a Buttigeig staffer. Her husband’s brother is comms director for Buttigeig and was tweeting out log in PINs during the election. And of course the whole ACRONYM operation is wrapped up with Democratic Party dark money. https://mobile.twitter.com/taraemcg/status/1223990978127724546 https://mobile.twitter.com/taraemcg/status/12239909781277245... https://mobile.twitter.com/bhalle87/status/1224558925946793985 https://mobile.twitter.com/bhalle87/status/12245589259467939... https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-a-dem-dark-money-group-is-invading-the-news https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-a-dem-dark-money-group-is-...
- matchbok 7y ago
  Yep, the DNC planned a whole conspiracy for.... Iowa.
  - sixQuarks 7y ago
    You’re naive if you think they WONT try to screw Bernie again
    - ianai 7y ago
      Big claims require big evidence. It’s dangerous to embrace the worst case scenario like corruption with open arms and requiring little evidence. People are doing it all the time now and it’s how the trolls win.
      - buzzkillington 7y ago
        Surely we can blame Russia for this, since there's no evidence that just means the Russians have been extra careful with the hacking.
      - sixQuarks 7y ago
        umm, it's pretty obvious if you dig into it just a little bit, and don't just rely on mainstream news. start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Committee_email_leak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...

zaroth 7y ago

There’s an extremely interesting and important discussion to be had around what happened with an App in Iowa, but TFA seems like the wrong plank to walk off of to have it. Maybe one day we will have an honest and true post mortem of what happened on Monday. Reports have been conflicting and non-sensical. No one that I can find has managed to actually show the app in question in detail, what numbers were meant to be reported, and how it actually all fell apart. I’ve heard explanations ranging from caucus chairs unable to login to the app, to the result reports coming out of the app being corrupted. Days later we’re still at only 70% precincts reporting and a race still too close to call. For what was apparently, a fairly low turnout event. We’re talking about a web form collecting like 6 integer values from 1,765 precincts, right?

giansegato 7y ago
That's exactly what I'm not getting. Everybody is discussing scalability problems, but as far as I've seen it all comes down to ~2K users and ~2K consequent form submissions. I can understand juniority, but here even a kid could've handled this kind of "scale"
kjaftaedi 7y ago
Even blaming the app is wrong in my opinion. They had backup plans in place where the precincts would just phone their results in. (as you would expect) ... except nobody was answering the phones. They were interviewing people on TV who were trying to report their precincts results over the phone, and were interviewing them while on hold. I remember one guy saying he's been waiting for hours for someone to answer. The app is a scapegoat because people are willing to accept "testing in production" as something that just happens, instead of what in reality should be considered gross negligence.
jellicle 7y ago
Yep. They've obviously had much longer than needed to simply report the values via paper and telephone calls, so the only reason you don't know those numbers now is that the party possesses them and is declining to release them. I believe it's perfectly legitimate to speculate about why the party might be declining to release them and to make adverse inferences. The time delay granted by claiming "technical problems" has been exceeded.

SuperFerret 7y ago

Meanwhile, it is now legal for the President to rig the election. Great year so far.

Proziam 7y ago

Bias Check: I didn't vote Bernie in 2016, I won't be voting Bernie in 2020, and I can honestly say there's not a single politician running that would actually represent my opinions and values. "It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a community." I don't know. I have serious doubts about whether or not we're seeing foul-play here. What we know for sure is that the app in question was partially funded by a(at least one) candidate. Essentially, a candidate gave money to the system that counted their votes. The company behind the app was founded by people tied to the Democratic 'establishment' (specifically, Hillary Clinton). And, as far as I can tell, the Democratic party has done everything in their power to ensure the candidate with the most name recognition and popular support in the race (Bernie Sanders) isn't their nominee. From what I have seen thus far this cycle, and from what I saw in 2016, I can't help but be suspicious.

arcticfox 7y ago
The baffling thing to me about so many conspiracy theories from Sanders' camp is that the delay hurt Buttigieg far worse than Sanders. Sanders is fine with no news from Iowa, the next primary is in his backyard and he has nationwide name recognition. Buttigieg on the other hand needs Iowa to be huge for him, and this fiasco certainly hurt that strategy.
- beeftime 7y ago
  The idea that the delay(s) hurt Buttigieg in any way is a profound misreading of the situation. Iowa has a small number of delegates, and it's only important in as much as it creates momentum for the winner going into the next three states. If they released the vote totals on time and Bernie won, that would have given his campaign momentum, which could have lead (still might) to a NH blowout. Instead, Pete got to "declare victory" twice -- night-of, and again after the 60% release. Now it really doesn't matter if they release the results and Bernie is shown to have won, because we're already multiple news cycles away from caucus night and most people aren't really paying attention, so it's going to be hard for Sanders to capture any momentum, if it's shown he has won. Pete, on the other hand, got a significant NH bump from the IA results in the latest polls. I think the only way it's hurt Pete is through IDP incompetence, where to most Americans (who hate a cheater and love a conspiracy theory) it looks, for lack of a better term, extremely shady. It's also fired up Bernie's base of die-hards, who are now on the warpath (or even more so) for the early states

huherto 7y ago

Please consider this. - In software engineering it is notoriously difficult to distinguish between capable and incapable companies/individuals. You basically need a very capable person to make the evaluation. But who chooses the evaluator ? - Even a capable company can screw up by no putting the right people in the project. - Even one person in a capable team can derail a project. - A project needs time to ramp up, go from alpha testing to beta testing to production. A project that goes from dev to production in one night has 10x the risk of a regular project. - 60k is very little money for such a risky project. - Finally, The obligatory don't ever, ever trust voting software https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/

LukeEF 7y ago
The obligatory xkcd! They should have known, right?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ianai 7y ago

This is clearly not an HN appropriate topic from the comments alone. This thread is devolving into a mixture of the worst possible interpretations of what happened with outright lies and misleading representations being used to fuel FUD.

Shivetya 7y ago
welcome to the shit show that has been present for quite awhile. at least this article up and declares its political while too many are slipped in under the covers and are very easily traced back to one campaign's or another talking points. just flag every article and maybe enough others will join in and we can get back to pretending to having an agnostic view on this site

skmurphy 7y ago

key paragraph: "In this moment in history, the network of institutions that comprise the Democratic Party, from cable news channels to law firms to campaign operative networks to Silicon Valley lobbying outposts like Facebook and Google, are hollow and obviously incompetent." This seems to be hyperbole, but I am not familiar with Matt Stoller so I reserved judgement and read a number of the back issues of his newsletter (archived at no charge on the site at https://mattstoller.substack.com/ https://mattstoller.substack.com/ ). I came across this https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/airplanes-and-accounting-games-the https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/airplanes-and-accounting-... which was written in December and correctly predicts the subsequent collapse of Boeing. Both articles are well written and insightful, the analysis is not from a political perspective but from a careful review of governance models and the impact of incentives on behavior.

ianai 7y ago
Well you won me over. I do think this guy is trying to honestly shed light on the powers of influence and concentration at work in the industry at large. I’m dubious though about the value of this particular article.

34679 7y ago

Definition of conspiracy 1 : the act of conspiring together Definition of conspire 1a : to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement b : scheme 2 : to act in harmony toward a common end Following the above, a conspiracy can be "the act of working in harmony toward a common end". Otherwise known as Politics. Whether there's a conspiracy here isn't up for debate; by definition a political party is a conspiracy. What's debatable is if they conspired illegally.

tptacek 7y ago

Why is Matt Stoller credible on this topic? Is there evidence he has better sourcing than a book he once read and a bunch of Google searches?

dmix 7y ago
Just sounds like some vague connections thrown together that happens to match the thesis of his book. Yawn.
- tptacek 7y ago
  Which I am happy to blow off when he's writing about random corporations but less sanguine about when his supposed authority on a political topic is the basis for a partisan political debate --- one rooted in conspiracy theories, no less --- on HN.

blhack 7y ago

I feel really bad for the people who made this thing. It looks like it was mostly interns/people at their first job out of a bootcamp. It was a mess, sure. My first major project was probably a mess too, except my "mess" would have been looking at a display and going "huh?", not being accused of trying to undermine democracy.

joering2 7y ago
Its a classical example of government waste and corruption. Some shady company collected millions while interns took blame for their first app not being robust and at the level of banking app. Sadly the winner of this fiasco is Trump. It was similar with Obamacare website. Done to the tune of $5 billion dollars (!!) it was mostly prepared by IT corporations located in India, the source code is/was terrible with jQuery hosted on some third-party CDN, it was/is a disaster.
- jellicle 7y ago
  As this caucus was administered and paid for by the Iowa Democratic Party, a private corporation, this is not a classical example of government waste and corruption, unless you're making the subsidiary argument that government shouldn't farm out or privatize essential functions like elections, which I would agree with.
- teucris 7y ago
  > Its a classical example of government waste and corruption. I agree on the corruption part, but elected governments had very little to do with this. To me that’s a double edged sword - the caucus process could be an independent expression of the will of the people (in theory anyway) but it also isn’t subject to proper scrutiny nor required to be a transparent process.
silenussays 7y ago
The thing that blows my mind is that they only spend around $60k developing it. Steyer and Bloomberg have spent 400 million dollars combined on ads in South Carolina. Couldn't any of the several billionaires that support the Democrats have kicked down a couple hundred grand for this at least? Even Epstein randomly handed out 100k checks to profs at MIT. It's not that much money for these people.

Judson 7y ago

To me, the Iowa Caucus Fiasco™️ is best explained by incompetence and embarrassment. A bug in the app caused it to fail, call centers overwhelmed, and a bunch of people who had been at the caucus for hours probably tried to take the reporting into their own hands, and caused even more delays. Verifying the results that were scribbled on an undated piece of paper by 1600+ volunteers is not an easy task. [Esp after the fact, when the whole verification was centered around username / pw / 2fa / + pin, which may have not been readily accessible for call-center use]. The Des Moine Register poll was scrapped for less, which is why it feels like a cover-up. Not because of any candidate bias, but because the caucus probably needs to be redone for the results to be credible under scrutiny, or nullified entirely, which would be quite an embarrassment.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

leto_ii 7y ago

It’s always been a bit of a puzzle for me to define just what the Democratic Party is. There are no formal membership dues, and registration varies by state. Candidates can sometimes run for the party nomination without being a member As a non-American this kind of stuff has always been a bit bewildering for me. Why is such opacity accepted in the electoral/political process? Doesn't this always risk shifting power to unknown and unaccountable individuals? Doesn't this muddying of waters allow for all sorts of hidden conflicts of interest?

DanTheManPR 7y ago
Part of the reason is that the framers of the US constitution hated parties, and seemed to take a "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" approach. With no backbone of written law to fall back on, US political parties only rely on their own rules as an organization of people. All the problems you described do affect them, and they used to be even more exclusive and opaque. The candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are fruits of the opening up of parties, effectively allowing takeovers by determined blocks of people.
LarryDarrell 7y ago
For the most part, most of our rules and traditions are there to make sure the poor and people of color stay disenfranchised.

LukeEF 7y ago

I mean srsly people, has nobody read the relevant xkcd? It was all so clear: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/

blazespin 7y ago

Gods, why not just take a picture of the voting sheet and send it in. Iowa only has about 1700 voting districts? I could data entry that myself in about 2 hours. Split the work among 10 people, and you'd have it done in 12 minutes.

elicash 7y ago
My guess is either (a) they're hand-counting all the paper backups, and/or (b) campaigns are chiming in and confirming or disputing results before the IDP makes the result public, which means more time for folks to weigh in and more fact-gathering before the public knows the results. And that while this wasn't the plan, the initial things going wrong caused such distrust in the process they felt this was necessary.

scottlocklin 7y ago

Funny Matt is usually a straight shooter but didn't mention Tara McGowan (CEO of Acronym; it's on linkedin) is married to Buttigieg senior staffer Michael Halle. Maybe he didn't notice. https://www.axios.com/pete-buttigieg-michael-halle-senior-staff-36f664e9-0099-4eb1-a01b-1f07cc488709.html https://www.axios.com/pete-buttigieg-michael-halle-senior-st...

leto_ii 7y ago

Does anybody know why this story was flagged? :-S