[The apparent malfunctioning of a new app, meant to transmit vote
totals, threw the Iowa caucus in disarray. And this benefited some
more than others ] [[link removed]]

JOE BIDEN FLOPPED IN IOWA. AND SO DID THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S
REPUTATION  
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Nathan Robinson
February 4, 2020
The Guardian
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_ The apparent malfunctioning of a new app, meant to transmit vote
totals, threw the Iowa caucus in disarray. And this benefited some
more than others _

Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden
speaks at a rally at the Drake University Olmsted Center in Des
Moines, Iowa, U.S., February 3, 2020., REUTERS/Carlos Barria
Photograph Carlos

 

If you’re the type of person who thinks the Democratic party is a
creaking, incompetent entity whose leadership needs overthrowing, the
Iowa caucuses certainly validated your point of view. None of us knew
who would win, but we had at least expected _a result. _We didn’t
get one, at least not on caucus night. State Democratic party
officials announced that due to “quality control” issues, release
of the result would be indefinitely delayed. On a conference call with
representatives of the candidates, party officials hung up the phone
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when asked when the totals would be released.

So what do we know? Well, one thing we can say confidently is that
“frontrunner” Joe Biden flopped. There were places where Biden
didn’t even meet the 15% threshold needed to maintain viability from
the first round to the second round – at one caucus site, the
attorney general of Iowa had to switch from Biden to Buttigieg
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when Biden was disqualified. It explains why Biden’s surrogate John
Kerry was heard on the phone the other day
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asking whether it would be possible for him to enter the race at the
last minute to save the Democratic party from being conquered by
Sanders.

Internal numbers
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the Sanders campaign, showing results from 40% of caucus sites, showed
Sanders winning with approximately 30% of the vote, Pete Buttigieg
coming in second with 25%, Elizabeth Warren third with 21%, and Joe
Biden a very distant fourth with 12%. If those numbers match the
ultimate totals, they are great for Sanders and absolutely horrific
for Biden. Sanders will have kicked the crap out of the frontrunner,
Barack Obama’s former vice-president and the man most favored to win
the nomination. It would be a stunning upset.

But Biden caught a lucky break. With the party not releasing the
actual result, his campaign sent a letter
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that the result be suppressed until such time as the “quality
control issues” were resolved. If it takes long enough to get the
official count, Biden may hope that Iowa is old news, or that the
issues surrounding the caucus are discussed far more than the actual
result. (That’s one reason we need to make sure we don’t get
bogged down too much in talking about the procedural issues rather
than the actual outcome.)

So what went wrong? It’s still not quite clear, though there were
reports that a special app used to transmit vote totals had
malfunctioned. Questions were immediately raised about who built the
app and how it had been deployed. Ironically, it was introduced in
order to “get results out to the public quicker” and had been
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“hastily put together” over the last two months. There had been
security concerns from the start, and when
[[link removed]] NPR
questioned the state party chairman, he “declined to provide more
details about which company or companies designed the app, or about
what specific measures have been put in place to guarantee the
system’s security”. Ironically, it was apparently developed by a
firm literally called “Shadow”, partly funded
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Buttigieg campaign.

If you’re a Sanders supporter, you have reason to be suspicious. We
had already seen the Des Moines Register suppress the results of its
“gold standard
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poll on the eve of the election, after a complaint from Buttigieg. And
with 0% of caucus results in, Buttigieg declared himself “victorious
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saying Iowa had “shocked the nation”. The only thing that had
shocked the nation at this point was Iowa’s total inability to
perform the relatively simple task of counting people’s votes. But
Buttigieg, good McKinseyite
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that he is, was getting a head start on deploying the PR spin.

For Sanders supporters, being denied a rightful victory in Iowa gives
feelings of déjà vu. In 2016, Sanders may well have won Iowa,
possibly by a lot, but the state party did not release the vote
totals. Instead, it only released delegate numbers
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showed Bernie narrowly losing the state “701-697” to Hillary
Clinton. The delegate numbers are calculated strangely (this time
around, in one precinct, Sanders beat Buttigieg 111 votes to 47 votes
in the “first alignment” but both ended up
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with two delegates). If the vote totals had been known in 2016, it
might have been clear Bernie had won. With his New Hampshire victory
shortly after, Clinton would have been seen as losing the race, and
the whole election might have turned out differently. That’s why,
this time around, the Sanders campaign ensured that the vote totals
would be released (and took a count of its own for good measure). This
time, if he wins, everyone will know … eventually.

Despite the chaos, certain aspects of the Iowa caucus were inspiring.
For the first time, a caucus was held in a mosque, and hundreds of
Muslims and non-Muslims came together to vote for Bernie
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first caucus of the day, immigrant pork plant workers
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evening shifts prevented them from joining the main event, came out
early to line up for Bernie. Internationally based Iowans caucused
around the world, including in Scotland
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Tblisi, Georgia
[[link removed]]. The Iowa
caucus might seem like a good illustration of the dysfunction in
American democracy, but some of its participatory elements are
beautiful. It would be a shame if the lively, communal caucus system
disappeared entirely in favor of secret ballots in voting booths, as
some were already recommending as the vote-counting mess unfolded.

If the Sanders team’s count is close to accurate (bear in mind, it
was only 40% of caucus sites), he had the night he needed to have. The
progressive vote is still being split between Sanders and Warren, but
at least Biden hasn’t managed to capitalize on that so far. The good
news for Sanders is that, even if Buttigieg does unexpectedly well,
Mayor Pete is destined to struggle as the campaign moves toward more
racially diverse states. But all of the results remain speculative,
since the Iowa [[link removed]] Democratic
party seemed determined to prove that we need a political revolution
that overthrows the party establishment.

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Nathan Robinson is a Guardian US columnist. He is the editor of
Current Affairs

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