Democrats Declined DHS Offer to Test Caucus App
bloomberg.com
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It is such a scam; makes working on Wall Street feel cleaner and more moral.
The wealth inequality that accelerated after the 2007 crisis has added a class warfare aspect to national politics where one did not exist before. Trump has largely eviscerated the Republican party by playing on this, and I think we're seeing this dynamic on the Democrat side this election cycle.
Yes, but not for the reason you stated. It's conspiracy theories like the GP posted that have led to the rise of Sanders and Trump.
You can hate Hillary, but she was probably the smartest, most experienced, and best qualified for the job as a maintainer of the status quo. I think we need to go beyond the status quo, but politics is (or was) the art of compromise.
Unfortunately politics is at its core a popularity contest and people vote with their emotions rather than their brains, which is why we have the current administration.
Look at Sanders's early education policy for example. It's just a single line. Getting early education and childcare right will benefit far more people and in a far more egalitarian way than getting postsecondary education right, but if you even suggest it, some "emotional" Sanders supporters will say you must be part of a banking conspiracy.
Platforms are not policies, they're goals. There's nothing wrong with having ambitious goals and then adjusting to reality whilst trying to implement them.
The Sanders camp clearly attracts a lot of emotional people as well, but at least they're emotional for a perceived good rather than perceived grievances -- to put a charitable spin on it :-)
No, she wasn't. She had very little of either electoral or executive experience for a Presidential candidate, but lots of experience as a less-accountable figure around politics and policy.
Whether as maintainer of the status quo or otherwise she was only modestly qualified.
I’m not sure rejection of her should be chalked up to “hate”, so much as sensible evaluation.
Citation needed.
> She had the DNC stack the previous primary for her.
Citation needed. She got millions more votes than her opponent.
This is exactly the sort of conspiracy-minded nonsense that Sanders and Trump thrive on.
After he lost the primaries to Clinton (a process I personally think was gamed by the DNC), he publicly supported her and encouraged his supporters to do the same.
We're discussing politics on HN and I don't want to incur dang's admonishment again. We are in very uncertain times these days so I think it's important to discuss key issues in a cogent and concise manner.
The key difference between Sanders and other politicians like McCain, Obama, etc. is that Sanders doesn't push against the fringe elements of his supporters, which encouraged them to grow into a large portion of his supporters.
Her opponent has taken that to new levels and if we are to discuss this topic it requires openness to the flaws of all involved, including our preferred candidates. To not do so is to engage in partisan bickering which is not appropriate here.
Citation needed about pay to play. Also, foundations pay their directors. Why is that surprising?
> the media were funneling debate questions to her
One person funneled one question to her. The Sanders campaign also said that same person helped their campaign, with one aide saying, "If Bernie Sanders had been the nominee of the party and the Russians hacked my emails instead of John [Podesta]’s, we'd be reading all these notes between Donna and I and they'd say Donna was cozying up to the Bernie campaign."
https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/3038...
> Separately, when she knew her records were about to be subpoenaed she destroyed data (the 30k emails) claiming they were personal - she didn't make a claim that they were privileged or irrelevant to the matter, much less let a judge determine this - she preemptively destroyed the information
Again, citation needed that she did this on purpose. The person who actually did it says otherwise.
> This is called spoliation of evidence and is a crime
It would be a crime if it happened as you said, but the investigation came to the opposite conclusion.
> at this point it's pretty disingenuous to be talking about Hillary as somebody who doesn't thrive on peddling conspiracy theories.
I never said Clinton doesn't, but now that you mention it, she clearly doesn't anywhere near as much as Sanders and Trump supporters.
Nor is telling flat earthers that their beliefs are based in conspiracy theory a good way to win their support. I am not trying to win their support by that comment, as this is not the proper forum for that conversation. I am simply stating a fact.
Citation needed. It is a known fact that Shadow is one of the few software contractors that works for cheap for Democratic candidates. The fact that Buttigieg also used them for cheap projects does not mean there is a conflict of interest, and immediately jumping to that conclusion indicates conspiracy-minded thinking.
Citation needed. The only people this has been widely accepted among are conspiracy theorists.
Progressives are tired of Corporate Democrats running their party.
:)
It's full steam ahead to another cycle of divisiveness, extreme polarization and getting nothing done.
This can be classified as a mutated variation of Enterprise Software Syndrome, the disease that makes enterprise software suck so badly.
Barring actual corruption, oftentimes ability to eventually get it done is more important to the buyer than features.
We work with, spend time with, and collaborate with people we trust. That trust usually comes from repeated, direct, human interaction or as a referral from someone who has that long-built trust.
That applies to the vendors we choose, the babysitters we hire, and the doctors we visit.
Asking someone to choose someone they don't trust is inherently risky, even if it works out.
Maybe it's just generally a hand grenade to hire any company that does political IT. Or maybe there's an opportunity for a truly neutral company to make inroads there.
Because they tend to be motivated, they (are assumed to) have congruent motives, and they tend to understand the landscape. They also tend to be cheaper, relatively speaking.
(These developers also tend to mostly work on campaign, rather than electoral, infrastructure, which makes them a poor fit here. I don't consider it a defensible decision by the DNC, but it's very defensible for most candidates to want to hire people who want to see them elected.)
Maybe for more complex projects this might be true, but any moderately competent developer could have built this.
I believe the Iowa DNC paid around ~$50K for this app. I have a hard time believing that isn't something any good dev shop would bid for given how simple the app is.
They were probably picked, to be frank, because they're the people that the folks in charge of picking a developer already had in their rolodex. Private organizations can do RFPs, but don't have to, and if you don't fully understand how bad a software project can go sideways, it's not going to be something you care too much about.
I think that's the concern people have about handing over control of anything remotely electoral in nature to them.
And really, you see this in lots of sectors where they want developers with experience in that domain even if it's not really necessary. Or at least, nowhere near as important as being a good developer is.
Everybody has a political tilt. Even somebody who doesn't vote, read the news, etc will still have opinions that are the political spectrum. Have you ever met a person (not just a developer) that doesn't have a political tilt?
Individuals make up companies/organizations so no matter what you will have a company that has somebody working on it who is not completely impartial.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-microsoft-is-changing-this-...
Truly neutral companies are hard to find; most companies of any proven competence have well-known political preferences, and those that don't there is going to be a concern of unknown and hostile-to-the-customer leanings, which you really don't want to discover after they've manifested.
Either way, the app broke, so even a shop with "experience" here completely failed at their job.
That is exactly the kind of attitude that leads to a disastrous rollout like this. You're applying a brand-new app and process to help with complex rules changes, and now you have a new organizational problem.
As someone who has had skin in the game with keeping political web tools working, this type of thing is terrifying. Nobody should be depending on new, single-use, day-of, tools. You can't test them or train them well enough.
I don't think the problem is ideology here, I think it's "consulting firm."
Remind me how that worked in the last presidential primary.. I appreciate the aspirational “supposed to” comment but they don’t have a good track record of neutrality. As the problems are never dealt with, I’m not sure why expectations would be different.
This year they have just recently changed the debate rules to allow Bloomberg to get in. If I were one of the other candidates, I would be ticked.
I think the DNC is anything but neutral. They seem to strongly put their thumb on the scale.
And now you see why so many non-Democrats have a fear of them getting elected. If the DNC can't give equal treatment to its own people with whom they disagree, what of the rest of the country for whom they have apparent disdain?
That's not really true; the winner of the general election becomes effective head of their party; a primary winner who loses the general generally has less (but significant) influence. Hillary Clinton has less control of the DNC after the 2016 election than before it (she had unusual influence before the election for a number of reasons); the reform eliminating first-ballot superdelegate voting rights was due to influence gained by the Sanders-aligned faction.
I'm seeing on Twitter that the app interface wasn't very intuitive and officials there were confused on how to use it.
Well other than there is no evidence of that and would that have even helped? My understanding of how the Iowa caucuses work ... what you describe would not advantage anyone. As I understand it the campaigns themselves are not reporting "I got X votes" directly.
I've not been to Iowa but I've been to some caucuses.. what you describe would not advantage anyone in my experience.
Buttigieg's comms director tweeted worksheets with the pin number to login to the app on Twitter https://twitter.com/bhalle87/status/1224558925946793985?s=20
If you don't know how the app works, how are you familiar with its security model?
They ended up being almost literally bang on, ironically enough.
The "rigging" possibility is just a maybe on top of that.
Shadow provides peer to peer engagement software, which is being used by the Buttigieg campaign. Just because the same software is being used in Iowa doesn't mean there is a conflict of interest.
As it stands, this is a blatant attempt to discredit the app developer, the Buttigieg campaign, and the DNC.
You're not even using the word 'conspiring' correctly.
An implication (by the speaker) is inferred (by the listener).
Sometimes people are wrong. If you don't like getting callled out, argue your position.
Is a vastly more broad statement. All I'm pointing out is that anti-vaxx people would say the exact same thing. Answer challenges with facts and arguments, not useless bold claims.
That Buttigieg pays $100,000 for software he doesn't need to cover up a bribe used to "rig" the preliminary results of the caucus? If that's the case, wouldn't it backfire horribly once the paper ballots get manually tabulated? Especially since that would probably happen around the time of the next (NH?) primary. A story like that ("Buttigieg didn't actually win in Iowa!") would totally derail any momentum (since the actual # of delegates in Iowa is fairly insignificant, about 1% of the total, my understanding is that the main value of the Iowa caucuses is to construct media narratives)
I guess you should let Hillary know she should not have been in control of a foundation that was receiving millions of dollars in donations from foreign leaders while she was the head of the department in charge of US foreign policy.
The whole country knows about Trump's most recent cronyism, and both his voters and his congress have made clear that they intend to do exactly nothing about it.
This company produces the textbanking software that the Buttigieg campaign uses. It's frustrating to watch people repeating the phrase "received money from the Buttigieg campaign" with the implication that it's a bribe when the actual situation is that both the Iowa Democratic Party and the Buttigieg campaign used the same contractor for some software.
I would want to see how much other campaigns paid for textbanking software but that seems unusually expensive.
Whether or not that's true is debatable, but I think it's a compelling point.
That's why it's called a swamp.
He probably is also hurt by Biden’s bad finish being lost in the chaos.
Also, what’s your source for Buttigeg’s $100K payment to the CEO of acronym? I head about $42K the buttegieg campaign paid to shadow, but that appears to be legitimate text messaging services.
It’s dirty politics to pedal conspiracy theories. I hope you can refrain around here.
(Also, I know some people in Newtown — conspiracy theories can get down right evil quickly. Be careful not to down a dark path because you don’t know where it’s going to end.)
"The wedding of Tara Elizabeth McGowan and Michael Mackay Halle took place Sept. 5 [2015]…"
"Strategist for @Petebuttigieg… Maximizing time with @taraemcg in the Ocean State"
> ACRONYM’s CEO, Tara McGowan, is married to Michael Halle, a strategist for Pete Buttigieg.
Thinking all the way through here, any momentum buttigieg gathers in iowa and new hampshire will be lost is south carolina and nevada, and then bloomberg will be a factor competing for his voters on super teusday.
Buttigieg's path to the nomination is having it given to him by superdelegates if no one gets a majority.
I understand that his chances are low regardless, but they're non-existent if he can't build a media narrative off of actually winning Iowa. That's been his plan from the start, and why he's sunk so much money into winning the state. It makes absolutely 0 sense to me that anyone thinks he would want to sabotage the caucus.
- always test your code - always test your code with people - never ever succumb to the temptation to ironically name your organization no matter how funny it is to you
What buffoons.
Major sign: Not only wasn't there a dry run before d-day, but they didn't even train the people expected to use the app on the app.
The corruption is traditional corrupt procurement (apparently connected to Buttigieg and the Clinton complex) rather than an attempt to fix the primary. Primary fixing will be done out in the open with sudden rule changes.
[1] https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presi...
The reason for putting this under the DHS rather then just outsourcing it directly is that the DHS have some kind of credible neutrality where as nobody trusts the DNC to not censor/rewrite any report they publish on their own.
There are many web sites where a 1700 request burst would hurt.
Not sure if this is an Android or iOS app but either way, it's possible there was something quirky in the implementation that didn't show up on the test phones or simulator. They may have even made a poor assumption such as there always being a network connection. That would be the case in their office but not guaranteed out in rural areas especially in rural areas with a sudden convergence of lots of people with cell phones in a confined space that doesn't usually have that much device density.
1a : lacking the qualities needed for effective action
b : unable to function properly
And some security testing and analysis also wouldn't have prevented this problem, unless it was done at huge scale.
There's also plenty of tinfoil hat fodder (some of it very valid) related to how connected the company that developed the app is to certain parts of the national party.
They repeated all morning on the radio "No interference or hacking."
Really it's just a classic case of people under-preparing and shit hitting the fan because everything didn't go 100%.
https://twitter.com/JTHVerhovek/status/1224550235881517056?s...
So who is now in possession of the paper records and how easy would it be to manipulate those records?
Edit: Apparently all those paper sheets also have PIN numbers to log into the app, so that probably is a contributing issue.
Anyone that's worked on a system with distributed state knows data consistency can be hard, particular in situations where the system comes under load and latencies begin to increase.
You're not specifically complaining about it, but I think it's interesting that they are being criticized for not being transparent, and then being criticized based on that transparency when they are.
This isn't without precedent, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_presidentia... (or https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/04/iowa-seco... for more narrative). Just 8 years ago in the Republican caucus in Iowa they changed the announced winner more than two weeks afterward.
I'm a broken record about this, but you probably don't want to work in a field where the norm is that the government checks your software engineering work, particularly for security; there is a longstanding track record of failure here.
None of this is to defend the app, which appears to have been, from conception through deployment, moronic.
> “We don’t see any malicious cyber activity going on,” Wolf said. “No one hacked into it -- so this is more of a stress or load issue as well as a reporting issue that we’re seeing in Iowa.”
> The Iowa Democratic Party has said there was no evidence of hacking in the much-delayed results, merely human error.
DHS wouldn't be the one to do performance testing. Sure they should have had security scans but the issue at hand is not related.
Your "legitimate traffic" for a finite population of intended users should by definition not be capable of compromising the capacity of your system to operate if you have allocated your resources correctly unless your fundamental implementation is unsound.
Any excess traffic beyond a modest multiple of your expected turnout (I.e. worst case scenario where every citizen of Iowa decides to attend the primary) would by definition be either potential tampering via fuzzing by unintended actors trying to inundate servers to drown out or frustrate your expected userbase,or the most accident/mistake prone gaggle of users ever.
Not saying that happened or that I've seen anything that says it did, I just find your assertion odd that you'd think that a staged DOS in the testing phase against your infrastructure isn't how performance testing works.
That's exactly what I'm saying... that's not a good test for performance.
It's a good test to see how your DOS mitigation plans work, but it's not a good test for production traffic performance.
There's nothing to indicate that. You could have the service behind any given DOS mitigation system and it would never even touch the back end...
For whatever reason, many, many people in positions of leadership have a hard time properly evaluating and mitigating risk when it comes to cybersecurity. Even when it's obvious that risk can absolutely destroy their organization.
Architecture, performance, and security reviews? Definitely should've happened. DHS? Ehh.
I haven't seen any reporting stating that clearly. At this point tt could've been any sort of bug. My money is on an AWS misconfiguration.
DoSing can be as dangerous as an RCE bug if your goal is to cause delays and chaos.
Plus, it doesn't make sense that it would be overloaded. They should have known exactly how much load to expect based on the number of caucuses held across the state. Also, Iowa isn't a populous state so the total number of datapoints is not going to be all that big. This should not have been a hard problem. The DNC is looking like a bunch of idiots this morning.
There are no conflicts of interest beyond those in niche markets anywhere. There are a finite number of people and companies serving in this space. Multiple campaigns use the same contractors, and those contractors will advise campaigns. The conflict of interest is known and the key thing is declaring them, siloing information, and policing behavior. This happens in every startup board where a customer participates in a funding round [and gets board seats].
Also, what was DHS going to do here? This is a private organization doing a [private] caucus in a single state. We've all read the mythical man month. DHS should focus on securing the national elections, which there is ample evidence they are behind on.
"Such a test from DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency would have focused on security and not the performance issue that Wolf said was most likely responsible for the failure. Still, Wolf said this was a “concerning event” given the amount of scrutiny around elections security after Russians targeted the 2016 presidential election.
“We don’t see any malicious cyber activity going on,” Wolf said. “No one hacked into it -- so this is more of a stress or load issue as well as a reporting issue that we’re seeing in Iowa.”"
I think they had a buggy app collecting caucus votes and I see people claiming it's some kind of vast conspiracy without any evidence. With all the people (metaphorically) tripping over their d*s around the world, it seems odd what kind of coverage this is getting. Particularly since (referencing my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22239685) a much more egregious issue happened in the same state's caucuses 2012 (not to mention the 2016 NV Democratic party screw up). The reasonable conclusion is caucuses are a mess and should be scrapped (which both parties are gradually doing).
https://mobile.twitter.com/heterodoxious/status/122458084831...
Well, if they worked on the Presidential general election at all, which obviously not everyone in that space did.
Also loving the profile pic that says "profile photos enable unconscious bias. I code with my brain, not my face."
Do you honestly believe that there isn't a company that could have made the app without direct financial ties to one candidate? There are certainly a number of developers who fit that description in this very thread.
There are a million companies that could have written this app. I could have written this app. The reason I didn't is that I don't target this market, don't have domain expertise in how caucuses are run [at the level of writing an app to administer one], and have no prior work to reference in the space. I have no doubt that's the reason the vendor was selected.
Here transparency is our resource to investigate whether these accusations are true. For instance, if there are monies not reported correctly or if there is some discrepancy between services provided and service rendered, then we would have evidence of a conflict of interest.
Such as yours.
> Also, what was DHS going to do here?
Test the app, as they offered.
> This is a private organization doing a [private] caucus in a single state
...So what? How is that a good reason to not care about it?
> DHS should focus on securing the national elections
The national elections are run by the states too. That's how elections work, they are decentralized..
"So what? How is that a good reason to not care about it?" Yes.
"The national elections are run by the states too. That's how elections work, they are decentralized.." Yes, and the FBI, DHS, and a number of federal agencies are consulted and have resources devoted to it. DHS has a webpage describing their involvement https://www.dhs.gov/topic/election-security.
What an excellent answer.
It wasn't a yes or no question...
What’s bad for the 24-hour news cycle is good for Democracy.
"'They hung up on me’: Iowa caucus official’s failed attempt to report precinct results makes for great TV and bad night"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus...
If there is voting involved, I suspect that is always the case.
Historically speaking you'll find that line of thinking pretty much constant.
"This isn’t the first time in the past decade that the process has failed to produce a timely result, which in turn arguably affected what happened next (which, after all, is what makes Iowa important).
In 2012, it was the Republican caucus that was a mess. Back then, Mitt Romney was named the winner of the caucuses by eight votes — a narrow victory, yes, but still a victory for the favorite to be the Republican nominee.
Romney went on to win the New Hampshire primary comfortably, apparently winning the often-elusive double in the first two contests — he would have been the first Republican to ever win both Iowa and New Hampshire — and setting him on course to face incumbent President Barack Obama.
Except eight days after that New Hampshire win, we found Romney actually finished second in Iowa. The Iowa GOP announced, 16 days after the caucuses, that Rick Santorum had actually finished first — by 34 votes. But even that result was tinged by uncertainty"
If you read the article, I'm actually leaving out the worst details (lost votes, misallocated votes, secret votes). The same explanation applies as this one. Caucuses are an overly complicated relic and should be discontinued by all parties. This current embarrassment has recent precedent in the other major party and in that respect is respecting tradition of demonstrating the fundamental, intrinsic ridiculousness of caucuses.
I expect:
A) A forensic analysis will quickly show where the problems lie
B) The analysis will be only superficially reported, likely due to NDAs with the app developer. In other words, no source code for you, voter!
C) With low probability, election integrity will ever so slightly increase by the time the 2024 or 2028 cycles come around,
D) No candidate will see this debacle as a big issue. Except maybe Bloomberg.
I think that also speaks to us engineers and startup founders, that there's not always a technical solution especially when the problem is cultural. I oftentimes go all gopher and dig dig dig into trying to find a technical solution, and it's hard for me to recognize this truth. I think if we all provided cultural solutions to cultural problems, at work and at the voting booth, we'd all be much better off. I'm slowly working towards this direction.
In this case, the tech firm was contracting directly with the Iowa Democratic Party, not with the national DNC. So the question here wouldn't be the tech competence of the national party, but of the specific state party that let the contract.
"When a light is shining, Shadows are a constant companion. 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."
Of course, some account has to own the spreadsheet and hence have write access. So it's not the ideal vote-tallying system.
For instance, in Costa Rica (3.4 million voters) we just elected mayors nationwide and received trustworthy results within a couple of hours (reported using a party-independent app).
Caucuses are also run by the Supreme Electoral Court. Kind of an Election-as-a-service.
It's likely that you have the same precient reporting in using both the app and the phone system and entries where someone is missing an zero or mistypes a 9 instead of an 8 somewhere, causing the votes cast to differ from voters present in some precients.
Now with an well designed sql schema detecting and eventually correcting this kind of data quality issues are straightforward but as this is the work of an small relatively new digital marketing agency with almost no record outside of working for the party machinery so whats the odds that this app is backed by an well designed transactional database framework rather then a quickly cobbled together nosql schema.
To make it worse this is an case where the democratic party could have demonstrated an commitment to more transparency and less centralization as there is no secrets that needs protecting and yet the Iowa democrats went down the opposite road of more centralization and less transparency in an move that's just showcasing everything that is wrong with america's political establishment.
The open democratic way to run an election like this would be for the individual districts to publish their results for 3rd party validation directly to the public when they are done caucusing instead of placing them in escrow until the incompetents at the party HQ is done calculating the way it seems to happen now.
As of now the app is likely destined for a complete rewrite with the actual tally being done the old fashioned way using calculators and spreadsheets so an DHS code-audit would just make the issue resurface at an inconvenient time when this is no longer news, as im pretty sure anyone with a clue about IT inside of the party machine knows exactly how they screwed up and prefers strange conspiracy theories to being exposed as mundane fools.
Edit: The pin numbers to log in to the app were printed on the paper sheets, and a lot of people took pictures of the sheets and posted them to social media not realizing the implication.
It's not a vote counting app, it's a vote count reporting app.
And it's not particularly hard, which is why I think the tech failure angle is probably wrong and that the problem is exactly what the IDP says: the vote counts actually being reported were inconsistent which might in part be an app UX/training problem, but is probably mostly an administration-of-caucuses problem, suspicion of which from 2016 is exactly why the DNC required the additional reporting this year, so that the integrity of the process could be verified.
No, the reason is because multiple campaigns (who tend to have precinct captains report the first and second alignment numbers and track how they are doing internally) complained about apparent inconsistencies in the final results in 2016, so the DNC required the additional figures to be tracked and reported officially with paper trails to provide transparency and confidence in the integrity of the results.
You have an app that's a critical part of the voting infrastructure for the most important caucus in the Democratic Party, and yet we don't know:
- Anything about the people who developed the app
- The source code for the app, which should be open source in my view
- Any information about the myriad of conflicts of interests that may or may not exist
Another learning lesson is that your startup can have poor or no marketing and have a non-functional product, but if you are well-connected, that's enough to close deals in certain verticals.
Iowa's Democratic Party still has a paper trail of votes. The results may be delayed but they'll at least exist.
On the other hand, GOP voters won't even get to choose who their nominee will be in certain states. Yes, I know the president will almost certainly win these primaries. But why not let people vote?
Sure, it costs money to hold the primaries, and maybe it causes embarassment to the president if he doesn't garner the vote he's expected to win.
But not holding primaries is simply utterly undemocratic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/us/politics/iowa-caucus-a...
Who are these people?
I'll take modern tech over faxes any day.
For the public who does not read further than the headlines this increases their scepticism agains digital and online voting. Much more than any security expert opinions can ever do.
Are we.... are we still pretending it wasn't rigged? Debbie Wasserman Schultz literally was forced to resign as DNC chair over the rigging scandal. I don't think the DNC rigging their 2016 primary is controversial or in dispute is it?
If so, framing it as "[President Trump]'s frequent claims" rather than an undisputed fact is disingenuous at best here.
From what I have read, it's strongly in dispute.
The super-delegates issue was really just a poor policy by the DNC, one that could be exploited by a strong establishment/mainstream candidate. Bernie has always been an outsider, relative to the Clintons, in that sense.
Some debate questions were provided to the Clinton campaign apparently because they had asked for them, whereas the Sanders campaign had not. In retrospect, probably not a good look, regardless of whether or not he/she asked for them. Probably should have immediately released the same questions to Sanders' campaign once Clinton's received them.
I feel like DWS was forced to resign because she was incompetent and directionless, and only got the job since she was a crony of establishment Dems who wanted a "friendly" to occupy the seat. This might also be me projecting, since I have a hunch that Republicans are better at mobilizing resources to achieve specific goals (e.g. judge appointments to courts of all levels, governorships), but I think I'm starting to digress so yeah.
Such a sad state of affairs for this website. If the folks writing these terrible comments are the same folks working in this industry, perhaps the sorry state of most web software is more understandable.
Since the conspiracy and lies are permeating all but one comment in this thread, here's a short roundup of replies:
* The DNC had nothing to do with the Iowa Caucuses, which are run by the Iowa Democratic Party themselves
* Caucuses have traditionally been pretty rough to manage. I remember when Mitt Romney won Iowa, until it was reported that Ron Paul won Iowa, until we realized it was Rick Santorum who won Iowa. It's not a party thing, it's a state thing.
* Nothing about a 1/2 day delay on reporting results "hurts Bernie", in fact, smart analysis is that it helps him and his narrative based campaign (just look at the comments here!)
* The people who conduct these operations are Iowa democrats, who appear to support Bernie more than anyone. So, the claim of many conspiratorial comments here is that "Bernie supporters are rigging Iowa to hurt Bernie". Disinformation doesn't really make sense when you actually follow the threads and write it out plainly!
Even if you're very spirited in your support for your candidate, it's important to do your best to be accurate and careful in your response to your fellow party members.
You have a poor understanding of the American electoral process and should re-evaluate your stance in it if your goal is to affect change.
> ...unfair to tell them that they're bad for being skeptical of the cancellation of the most important poll and delaying the results...
I'm not saying they shouldn't be skeptical, I'm saying it is wrong to attack other democrats without evidence and point fingers at other candidates because you're upset that Iowa had a poorly run caucus.
I would also caution against assuming the outcome of any poll or caucus, most of all Iowa which is a tremendously difficult caucus to interpret.