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Comment by marcell | Hacker News Reader

My coworker has an alternate theory that frankly makes a lot more sense than “the app broke.”

The Iowa caucus is not a paper ballot. People stand in groups in a large multipurpose room and raise their hands for who they vote for. Depending on the viability threshold, people move to new groups and are recounted.

The exact rules are complicated and the process is run by unpaid humans. Moreover, in 2020 everyone has smartphones to post embarrassing mistakes on social media. And this year is a very crowded primary for the democrats, raising the chance for error.

Under this theory, the app is a convenient scapegoat to hide the fact that the process is inaccurate and bad. For politicians this seems pretty convenient. Who would you rather blame, and decades old tradition or an app contractor?

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I don't think that's a better theory. The process may be 'bad' but it has been that way, and worked, for a long time. As far as we know, the new ingredient was the app.

There were some confounding factors, like an apparent day-of decision to require the caucuses to report the results of every vote cast, not just the last one. This led to considerably higher data requirements in precincts where multiple votes were necessary to reach consensus. The new requirements were apparently not reported to the staff until around noon on the day of the election.

As anybody can tell you, nothing sinks projects faster than changing requirements late in the development cycle.

The app also sucked for another reason. Lots of Iowa is rural and cell coverage can be spotty. The app was designed with the all too common assumption in this day and age that the Internet works everywhere.

The extra information has been known since 2016. Bernie (or his campaign) asked for it as a means of providing additional transparency into the process.

> The process may be 'bad' but it has been that way, and worked, for a long time.

The process has never worked. I attended a couple caucuses myself between becoming 17 [0] and leaving Iowa. I still hear about them from family. They have various flaws. The most severe one IMHO is that due to the time commitment, they only reflect the voice of die-hards and/or those with few responsibilities. That's true for choosing the candidates and even more so for choosing the platform.

However, I imagine you mean this specific failure mode (unable to produce an authoritative count within X hours for some smallish X) is new. AFAIK, that's correct.

I would love it if this failure inspires them to change to a standard primary process. Probably won't, though.

[0] iirc you can participate if you will be 18 by the general election.

Yes, I just meant that it has worked in the sense of reporting timely results. I agree there are other flaws with caucuses.

FYI new reporting seems to be backing up this theory: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/upshot/iowa-caucuses-erro...

Example of rule confusion: "No new voters are permitted to join the caucus after the first alignment. But in at least 70 precincts, more than 4 percent of the total, there are more tabulated total votes on final alignment than on first alignment."

That's just silly. The process has a lot of faults, but they're mostly around their inclusiveness. If anything, the fact that a bunch of people can visibly see the results of their respective caucuses, can report (e.g. tweet) on them real-time means that the ability to manipulate them is much, much harder.

Picture it, there's 100 people in a room who all have to move themselves around to their respective candidates and people count them and shout out the numbers.

All of the candidates are represented (they're reporting the numbers) and can hear the same numbers, all of the voters can hear them too.

It's messy, but it's probably one of the most difficult systems to "hack" in terms of real numbers since so many people know the results immediately.

I don't think the hacking malicious. People just make mistakes.

Random example: if candidate is below the viability threshold, that group is supposed to disband and join another group. You could have a mistake where, on the 2nd round, two non-viable groups merge and form a viable group.

For example, maybe Biden is at 14% and Klobuchar is at 2%. Under rules, those groups are both non-viable. But you could easily see a mistake where the caucus operators allow the 2% Klobuchar group to "merge" with the Biden group.

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