Minnesota is not too happy about having that klutz of a state touching our southern border — we’re trying to edge our way up northwards, or lobbying for a different seat with the cool kids, rather than having to eat lunch at the table with these gomers that surround us. How about if we trade places with Nevada, or Idaho? Hanging out with Washington and Oregon would be more our style.
Yeah, Iowa FUBARed their shining moment in the sun, that day when all eyes were on the state with the the first primary election in country, and they flopped hard. We still have no election results today. The candidates have all jetted off to New Hampshire, making vague declarations of “feeling good” about their success, despite all of them having vote tallies of zero. I guess it’s sort of true that they’ve all tied for first place.
First big mistake: Iowa election officials announced that the first votes would be available around 9 or 10 pm last night. They weren’t. They set up the news networks, which had their usual babblers lined up to comment endlessly on preliminary results, and they had nothing. The Big Mouths had to sit on their thumbs all night chattering away about even less information than they usually do. Iowa made enemies.
Second, even older mistake: Caucusing. It’s a weird old-fashioned do-si-do that no one but old grey-haired party apparatchiks understand, and that discourages new people from participating. I’ve been to a couple, and was not impressed. I like that it’s an opportunity to discuss the issues, but what it really means is that you make a preliminary and public declaration of who you support, and then old grey-haired party apparatchiks come to you and try to talk you into supporting their candidate, because he (yeah, he) has the most votes. It’s not great if you support a change candidate.
Also, the caucus just looks stupid.
Third big mistake: they relied on an app, a mysterious unnamed app of unknown origin, to report the results to party leaders. The app failed hard and spectacularly. It doesn’t seem to have worked at all. Their back-up plan was to have precinct leaders just phone in the results, but they didn’t have enough phone operators to deal with the flood of calls, so that failed big-time, too. A few industrious precinct leaders tried to drive to headquarters with their paper tallies, and were turned away.
The DNC really needs to read xkcd.
Fourth big mistake: WHY IOWA ANYWAY? They are not at all representative of the diversity of the United States, but every election cycle the goony yokel elbows its way to the front of the stage, capers for a bit, all the candidates buy a corn dog at the state fair, and they and the media treat it as prophecy. It’s annoying, primitive, and as we’ve seen yesterday, downright embarrassing. This is democracy? Jesus.
I think the truth might be that American elections have been bought and sold to Big Corn Dog.
Lauren Duca isn’t impressed with the system, either. It’s a “fun little block party for white people”.
I think the DNC (thanks for the enlightening hack Russians) and Democratic Party are corn dog.
And yeah…why Iowa? Why haven’t they been demoted already? So corn-ball. Caucuses? WTF.
A quiz I took from WaPo (linked from unnameable blog) said Warren and Steyer are closest to my views. That’s about as much as I care to explore the issues. Rational ignorance works for me given I’m not even a drop in the bucket, though my state is usually tight and has fucked up elections before.
Your whole candidate selection system is a mess. Up here we do it the simple way. If a party needs a new leader we have a leadership convention, the delegates vote for the candidates, and they become the new leader. The campaign lasts at most a few months. We don’t have a year and a half of elaborate nonsense.
I’ve said this before – maybe even on this blog – but Caucuses are often an immense amount of fun and can be great for building solidarity, unity, and enthusiasm, but they are a horseshit means of figuring out which candidate has the most people willing to cast a vote for them.
And the best bit is that I doubt anybody currently could give you a sensible estimate as to whether it’s more likely that the app failure was a result of simple incompetence, active malice, or some combination of the two… You’d be better off trusting some random guy you met at the bus station to tally the results – at least the attack surface is comprehensible.
The security assessment for the app proposal should have been one word: “NOPE”.
I can’t help but suspect that the never-ending US electoral cycle has been deliberately developed to minimise the possibility of any actual politics happening.
It would make a lot more sense to me if all primaries/caucuses in every state were held on the same day, like the general election. That way no one state or few states would have a disproportionate influence in determining the nominee. Doubt this will happen but I can dream …
It’s worth remembering that Pat Robertson won the Iowa primary in 1988. It’s Iowa. Once every four years we’re reminded it even exists and they like to make it special.
Mayor Pete wasn’t vague, nor was he honest. Apparently, it was just his plain, unrevised victory speech, which in no certain terms claimed it as a “victory.” Because he’s a trashy, lying slimeball. Or he’s way more stupid than anyone ever realized. I guess he’s desperate for something good to come from Iowa, because without that, his campaign is probably over very soon. (Maybe it’s over soon anyway, but he could try to keep it dragging on a little longer.)
That’s only part of it. If they really wanted to use technology effectively, they could’ve made a program to do the calculations required for the various stages of their idiotic process. Fuck, it doesn’t even need to be anything that fancy. Just make a damned spreadsheet and have them enter the numbers into it. Poof! Done. Simple. The end.
But you definitely don’t want to have a bunch of untrained/half-trained/confused people try to interpret a convoluted set of instructions, intended for this highly unintuitive system that you’ve set up for no good reason at all, then wait around for the people doing to make all sorts of errors with their arithmetic.
Much better to automate that kind of shit as much as possible. I’m really not a total Luddite — and yeah, This isn’t the kind of shiny, new, gimmick technology that people eat up and quickly regret, but it is the kind that can be useful.
But seriously? All you do is make some ridiculous smartphone app that’s merely for reporting to HQ, which was not an actual problem that needed solving in the first place? And it doesn’t work? Great move, Iowa Dems. You figured out how not to use technology to help people with actual problems they face, and then you figured out how to fuck even that up.
But let’s back up just a bit more, to ask why even a basic spreadsheet (or anything approaching that) would’ve been useful to begin with. That’s because the caucuses aren’t a form of direct democracy, in which one simply counts how many people voted for each candidate. That would be something that not only makes sense and is fair and aligns what this country tells itself that it is, but it’s also something young children could do with no further instruction. So of course they don’t do that. They have their beautiful garbage fire of tradition to uphold, after all. And come on, would you really expect anything like democracy from “Democrats”? (Okay, fine, you would. But nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition — can we agree on that?)
“in no uncertain terms,” that is. Also certain: he should just drop out now and spare us more of his asshattery.
Nothing I like better than the media being forced to wait for complete and accurate election results. Fast partial results are not the objective, it only feeds the horse race mentality. They are waiting for complete and accurate results, right?
Today makes me very glad I moved 32 years ago.
Of course, the Trump machine is ecstatic because this flub shows what a bunch of bozos the DNC and Democrat candidates are. Oh well, maybe it will make the RNC overconfident or something. At least, the flood of emails for donations hitting my inbox will taper off for a week or so
National election reform should be a high priority, but those who profit from the mess on both sides of any illusory divide have no vested interest in pursuing it. I don’t look for it to happen in my life time.
Why Iowa:
Iowa has mutli-stage caucuses that require multiple meetings. To make sure there is enough time, there is a mandatory gap between each stage. (Why caucuses? They tried a primary in 1916. Nobody showed up).
In 1972, the Democratic convention was unusually early. That forced the first round of Iowa caucuses to go early, to allow enough time for all the stages. The early caucuses drew media attention. Attendance spiked. Iowans decided they liked the attention and the turnout, so they codified their early caucuses in state law.
That’s the executive summary.
@6
A lot of the US electoral system and government seems set up entirely so that a small non-representative group of ignorant ass white people have a disproportionate amount of influence. Whether it’s the Electoral College, the Senate, or the Iowa Caucus, there is very little about how politics is practiced in the US that doesn’t seem hell bent on protecting the ability of selfish and narrow-minded white folk to feel like they’re important.
OOOH! An informed Iowa voter:
” Nikki van den Heever, a caucus precinct captain for former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, tried to talk down an Iowa woman who was incensed to find out — in real-time during a caucus after she’d signed a card supporting him — that the candidate is openly gay.
“Are you saying that he has the same-sex partner? Pete?” the woman says in the clip, which was posted to both Twitter and Reddit early Tuesday morning. “Yes,” van den Heever responds.“Are you kidding?” the woman says, and upon being told Mayor Pete is married, says “Then I don’t want anybody like that in the White House. So can I have my card back? He better read the bible.”"
https://www.joemygod.com/2020/02/dem-iowa-caucus-goer-upset-to-learn-buttigieg-is-gay/
At least a couple places are claiming that the app that Iowa was relying on was made by someone with close ties to Mayor Pete’s campaign. No idea how accurate that is.
Well, this Iowan is not embarrassed. I’m slightly disappointed. I do want to note, though, that the app is not for the official results. It was for getting out unofficial results to the media and campaigns so that they’d know who the winner was. That, of course, never backfires. (That’s sarcasm, of course. The Republicans goofed up back in 2012.) As far as I know, my precinct successfully reported results.
Otherwise, I’m curious how the process of electing delegates works in states with a primary. I supposed different states may have different processes, of course. I just know that part of the caucus process is selecting delegates from a precinct to go to county conventions. This part of the process can actually be useful for getting younger people involved as they may get thrust into a delegate role never having planned on that going into caucus night. (The old geezers don’t necessarily want to commit to the long days of being a delegate.) I know that helped me to become more involved back in ’08. Granted, I was looking for ways to become more involved, but being a delegate had never even occurred to me until I became an alternate that then got seated at my county convention.
I, too, wonder…why every election cycle Iowa and then New Hampshire get the first say and thus undo influence on who the candidates are?
The problem wasn’t the caucuses per se, but the reporting app that malfunctioned. A friend who was a precinct chair there told me that when he tried to use the reporting app he was repeatedly getting error results, so he ended up phoning his precinct results in. It’s not a good idea to just go with an app that hasn’t been tested in the field.
Maybe you’ll be embarrassed that you’re simply wrong, according to many reliable accounts by actual journalists. You just seem to be pulling this crap straight from your ass.
The Iowa Dems themselves mentioned “inconsistencies” in the data, explaining why they had to do more (and it turns out, much much more) to verify what the results even were. That is, to themselve — their own results, which they were not confident about, because of the aforementioned inconsistencies. Does the data still exist somewhere? Sure it does, but that is useless to absolutely everyone, unless/until it’s known to be a consistent set of data that can actually be trusted, which means they had to go through this “quality control” business.
But there is no other “more official” layer of this clusterfuck to discuss. That’s sort of a silver lining I guess, because such a thing would be even less transparent and more ridiculous than the crap we’re aware of at this point, which I admit is awfully hard to imagine.
@ consciousness razor #8
Honestly the more I learn about Pete the more I think he is a scummy dude who is willing to lie through his teeth to everyone in order to get elected. Like how he played up his McKinsey work when he was under the NDA so couldn’t give specifics and then when the NDA expired and it became clear that his previous statements were at least gross exaggerations if not out right lies he plays down the work he did for them. I guess I was fooled initially by his facade but the more I look into him the crumblier his facade gets.
After Epic ‘Nightmare’ in Iowa, Democratic App Built by Secretive Firm Shadow Inc. Comes Under Scrutiny:
@20
As all the precinct caucus chairs have hard copies of their caucus results, eventually the totals will be tabulated and duly reported. The screw up of the reporting app doesn’t affect that. It just looks bad.
It must have shaken more than a few wine moms and KHive holdouts on twitter that the candidates who preemptively declared victory and have made calls to contest the reliability of the results were Buttigieg and Biden respectively, rather than the person they’d been writing scaremongering fanfic about for weeks.
Nevada was scheduled to use that same app. Obviously, that plan is scrapped and an alternate, likely equally untested app is now scheduled to be used.
Because, testing software is just a crazy notion, rather than just using it and making a spectacle of oneself.
Just another data point for why I want Sanders to win because he’s “not a Democrat”. Look at the Democratic Party here in 2020:
First they backed Biden, a pro-war, pro-corporate shill who is extremely pro-authoritarian, explicitly says, in public, that he loves Republicans and rich people and doesn’t want to change anything after 3 years of Trump. He is also the person who bears the most personal responsibility for the student loan crisis (created the bill which prevents student loan debt from being discharged in bankruptcy) and also the proto-fascist PATRIOT Act. What a great choice!
Then they literally let Bloomberg buy his way into the debates by counting the money he personally spends on his campaign as “donations” and making donation totals the bar candidates have to reach.
And now they let a company which is run by blatantly pro-Buttigieg people count the votes at the first caucus — which permitted Buttigieg to declare victory despite coming in a distant second to Sanders in terms of actual preferences. Yeah, the real numbers will eventually be released — the Bush administration eventually admitted Saddan Hussein never had WMDs, too, but look at how many people still believe their initial claim.
People who still back the Democratic Party out of loyalty, you are a bunch of damned fools.
@ 2 timgueguen
Another amazing thing is that USA is just about the only democracy I can think of, that has two official, institutionalised parties that are incorporated into state and other governments. Unless I completely misunderstand system each state maintains a government-sponsored list of registered voters that indicates party affiliation. Weird!
A question for US readers : Can one be a registered Green voter or Communist voter?
The only other institutionalised parties I can think of would be the Communist Party in Cuba or the Communist Party in the People’s Republic of China. There probably are more.
I must admit I’ve never quite understood what or how the primary/caucus system works down there but it is a mess. As far as I have been able to figure out, US parties do not have the same concept of membership, that is paid membership, that we see in most countries.
It did strike me, just this morning that perhaps one of the reasons that the USA has no real third parties is that politically oriented people spend most of the time actually campaigning rather than organising at a grassroots level to create a new party. I cannot see Preston Manning being able to organise the Reform Party if the country had been in a constant state of campaign turmoil. Plus it would probably be hard to organize the Reform Party when most of the people in Alberta already were registered Liberals or Conservatives or even Dippers.
Third big mistake: they relied on an app, a mysterious unnamed app of unknown origin
@ 16 microraptor
Possible source?
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/02/04/buttigieg-backer-top-funder-of-group-behind-iowas-disastrous-voting-app/
Remember the Democrats had to protect against the Russians! My god, they could have hacked a pencil and paper count count and taken over the phone lines.
@28
That fevered story doesn’t live up to the hype. Here’s more from NBC News about that:
It does seem like paying around $21,000 for text-messaging services isn’t an “investment” as Blumenthal implies.
When gaming companies roll out a new online game, they often have outages as all the new players try to load the game semi- at once, or there are hundreds of thousands of sign-ups in an hour. I can’t think of the number of times games have melted down because it’s really hard to accurately simulate the load generated by something new that does something different, but is being deployed by hundreds of thousands of people. Load modeling is a serious problem there.
Games like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty regularly used to experience ‘rush hour’ loads of ten million+ users. So that’s actually bigger than a state election, but quite a bit smaller than a national election. It doesn’t take much to cause cascading overload failures. The Iowans appear to have had some friend of a friend sell them a solution. That’s what happens when you listen to marketing assholes. Better luck next time.
I was listening to The Intercept‘s podcast, about the Caucus and technology, and it sounds like a lot of the people who go are doing it for funsies and don’t know much about the candidates but are just going to switch around and have a good old time jerking the system about so they can feel important.
It’s always seemed to me that what the parties should have is collections of voters who have histories of voting the way they say they will. Then, you ask them “who would you vote for?” and do a ranked choice and there is your candidate. No need for all the stupid fist-bumping.
jrkrideau@#27:
Can one be a registered Green voter or Communist voter?
Yes, but since they don’t have caucuses there’s not much point. In that case it makes more sense to register with whichever party controls your district, so your vote counts – otherwise it’s just rigamarole. That’s why I’m a republican, this year, in Clearfield county. Also, I’m less likely to get purged from the rolls. Coincidence, for sure.
From the outside U.S are really hard to understand, the traditions, processes and mechanisms are very strange.
But one imagines that this is just unfamiliarity with another culture until you sit down and try to get to grips with it – and learn that the U.S doesn’t understand or practice anything that looks like democracy to other people.
A really good example (I believe) is that legally felons in Iowa can’t ‘caucus’ and vote for a party candidate…
…what the fuck does the state have to do with a political parties choosing of it’s candidates?! That’s just wrong, wrong, wrong!
Political parties exist to change the state, under no circumstances at all should the state have anything to do with political parties membership or their rights within the party – that’s so obvious that the U.S doesn’t practice it is a big stonking sign that the U.S doesn’t do democracy, at all.
With 62% of the results just in for the Iowa Democratic caucuses, it’s:
Pete Buttigieg at 26.9%
Bernie Sanders at 25.1%
Elizabeth Warren at 18.3%
Joe Biden at 15.6%
Amy Klobuchar at 12.6%
Now for the remaining 38% to come in.
Marcus,
I don’t think that’s comparable; online games typically are multi-gigabyte downloads just for the client, and the in-game data transfer is ongoing and very much greater.
(Isn’t voting basically just filling out a form?)
John Morales@#35:
I don’t think that’s comparable; online games typically are multi-gigabyte downloads just for the client, and the in-game data transfer is ongoing and very much greater.
Yeah, but that’s just bandwidth, regardless of the direction. Most game assets are served by asset servers that are separate from the (basically) database machines that store the game states. When you look at big meltdowns like some of the WoW updates, the failure modes are various. One update it might be a queuing limitation in the authentication server, another it might be a file descriptor table in an asset server, or a flow table limit in a firewall. I’ve been pulled into incident responses on some of these disasters (notably a Walmart.com meltdown the busiest shopping days before Xmas, 200?2) and the meltdowns are often weird interactions, e.g: a missed increase in an Oracle server’s cursor table, which caused web transactions to backlog and queue on a database posting. Simulating this kind of stuff entails, basically, simulating the entire system under load – because you don’t know where the “gotchas” are until you load it up.
I blame modern software development practices for a lot of this, because distributed ‘stateless’ server models work great except that anything interesting needs to save state and suddenly parallel processes serialize violently. I pity the programmers; there is basically no such thing as a distributed process debugger and coders are stuck doing print statements to log files and trying to decode the semi-serialized logs.
(Isn’t voting basically just filling out a form?)
Yeah, but … That’s a good example of incipient places for failure. A voting application needs to authenticate, which means it needs an identity framework that is deployable and scales to the size of the app without serializing and becoming the deadlock in a parallel system. A voting app (this fail-thing was just trying to post data to summary places) would need to do some cryptography; cryptography notably has some odd scaling properties and magnifies small errors into complete failures (if it’s done right).
The point is that this stuff is not simple. Computer scientists like Avi Rubin have been beating up voting machines for decades and I don’t think any version of any voting machine has survived for very long at DEFCON. That ought to be a huge “disaster imminent” sign but instead the corporations that sell these things shrug and say “we’ll fix it in the next version!” I honestly think this is one service/capability that ought to be developed under the aegis of government, with a full app-sec and app-testing framework, network design, security design, implementation test-points – the whole thing. It’d be expensive. And the US would not want to pay for it.
Take a look at what’s happening with 5G and Huawei – that’s all part of a design/development lifecycle problem coupled to a trust problem. Industry’s reaction has been incompetent: double down on methods for writing more bad code faster, and market patched up old stuff as prototypes of new stuff. I’m glad I’m just going to be another inconvenienced customer, and not inside the sausage factory.
Marcus, thanks for the elaboration, particularly about the authentication aspect.
The software was produced by a company named Shadow for a non-profit group named ACRONYM. They are part of the Democrat’s establishment “blob”. See:
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/iowa-caucuses-the-blob-and-the-democratic
kaleberg, @ #38:
Are they trying to sound like the baddies in a low-rent Bond knock-off?
Marcus, @ #36
And, of course, the typical rapid-development phone app just relies on somebody else’s cloud infrastructure for all of the interesting bits, so the devs neither know nor care what the entire system actually looks like. They’re just plugging a bunch of black boxes together… It’s all somebody else’s problem, which sounds great until it becomes your problem.
“Shadow inc.”? “ACRONYM”?! srysly??!! O.o
I thought that was snark, FFS!
What’s next, the Umbrella corp.??!!
Dr. Evil and his minions aren’t even trying anymore!
wait, please tell me it’s snark … please?