Why can’t we just count votes by hand? To me this is over optimization and really just helps a special interest group who wants to sell apps and voting machines. It’s not like we pay a lot of money for election volunteers.
Bruce Schneier thinks that the best compromise is to to have paper ballots that can be counted by a machine or by hand. If all observers agree the vote was right, machine count stands. If someone challenges the vote, you count by hand.
The caucuses are not normal elections: there are no ballots. The results are literally counting where people in a room are standing and recording that on a spreadsheet. The problem has been relaying that spreadsheet to the party.
This year, caucus participants also have cards on which they write down which candidate they supported in each round. So there’s a verifiable trail beyond the head counts.
Early reports on the radio mentioned that people trying to call in and relay the results were waiting ages on hold, but they also said that the reason phones were so heavily used was that the app was giving inconsistent results. I never heard any more about what that could mean exactly.
The Iowa Democratic Party was quite clear that their explanation was that the numbers being reported through the app were inconsistent; the reason there are three sets of numbers (first alignment, second alignment, and state delegate equivalent) reported from each precinct and then aggregated this year is that multiple candidates in the last cycle complained about apparent inconsistencies in the final results vs. there internal tallies (because voting is not private in caucuses, campaign precinct captains tend to report out results to the campaigns), and the DNC imposed transparency requirements to provide confidence in the final results.
> The Iowa Democratic Party was quite clear that their explanation was that the numbers being reported through the app were inconsistent
I guess that’s the part I don’t understand very well. Does that mean the number of delegates didn’t match what the math said they should based on the final voting counts? Or does it mean some of the folks who used the app to report the counts also called in with different numbers? Or something else?
As of last night, that was unclear. I’m hoping that they do a whole post-mortem on what went wrong and how they resolved it.
> I guess that’s the part I don’t understand very well. Does that mean the number of delegates didn’t match what the math said they should based on the final voting counts?
I'd don't know whether it's hard inconsistencies (e.g., delegate counts not right given second alignment totals) or just improbable combinations that call for manual review out of caution (e.g., second alignment numbers that are technically possible but improbable given the first alignment) or a mix.
I think this is the first year that they are reporting the results of each round. My guess is that the round-to-round numbers didn't match expectations, and my guess-the-second is that more people leave between rounds than we realized.
> I think this is the first year that they are reporting the results of each round.
It was.
> My guess is that the round-to-round numbers didn't match expectations, and my guess-the-second is that more people leave between rounds than we realized.
They diagnosed the problem to the reporting functionality in the app not including all data in all reports, not unexpected results in the actual logged data.
Many of the people didn't know they were going to be required to have a certain app, and that's why they didn't download it beforehand. They were then told to rely on the phone call-in method, which failed.
Many of the caucus sites don't have good enough cell reception to download an app at the last minute. Imagine yourself arriving at a location with poor cell reception, told to download someone else's unknown code onto your personal phone using a weak or nonexistent cellular data signal. Problematic to say the least. Finally, the next day the Internet calls you "old people" as a final slap in the face.
Minus the google being evil part, this entire operation could have been done in google sheets and would probably have gone 100 x better. With free robust revision history, permission control, and everything....
I would set up each reporting unit (precint/causaus site) with their own sheet. There are probably only 5-10 officials per site that should even have edit access, maybe less, like only secretaries?
Make a nice formatted layout specific to that year. People feel pretty comfortable in excel-like spreadsheets/forms.
Then at the state level, since you have permission to all the sheets, its simple to aggregates all the sheet data
It's not some wiz-bang branded app with fancy animations, but its piggybacking on a very robust spreadsheet system that many people have some experience/intuition with.
It feels like a caucus exists to arbitrarily filter out participants based on how long they take. Not everyone has the 2-3 hours to spend on a caucus vote. Why don't they just vote via paper ballot?
It's worth noting that the caucus is supposed to be much more than just registering your presidential preference. The idea is that you have a regular gathering with your neighbors to discuss political concerns. That most people view it as an elaborate and slow version of a primary is an indictment of how sad the state of political participation in our country is.
That being said, it is an excellent way to exclude people who have other responsibilities or difficulty making it out for several hours on a week night.
It sounds like it's good at excluding a number of participants: those with physical disabilities, parents of young children, minimum wage workers who can't get time off, on-duty medical and emergency personnel, etc.
As a point of interest, those last groups are theoretically covered. I've heard of a concept of workplace caucus groups, where voters who can't get away (like medical staff) can be counted with others on the same shift. I have no idea how prevalent that is, and right now I can't find any relevant documentation either, so maybe it's not really a thing?
Because Iowa chose to have a caucus, not a primary.
If you’re not an Iowa voter, there are a million political bikesheds that would have more relevance to your life. You’re basically just complaining about the pace of a television program.
In this specific case? Because Iowa wanted to be the first contest in the nomination process, but NH legally gets to run the first primary. Caucusing is an older alternative to voting that served as a loophole to allow Iowa to go first.
One of the changes this year was that if your candidate made it through the first round of voting, you could go home. So that should have helped the situation somewhat, but I wonder if it contributed to the inconsistencies. At least there’s a paper trail this year too.
Exactly. I think that machines can be used just fine in a very specific configuration. I.e. you go to a machine, select the choices you want, that machine prints out a ballot with your choices. You review that ballot. If the ballot is correct, you go over to a tabulation machine, feed it in, and call it a day. That machine retains the paper ballots if verification is needed.
EDIT: And if someone wants to fill out a paper ballot manually, let them. Just have a few spares around, most people won't.
This is how the new voting machines we use here in Austin work.
Big friendly, easy to use touch screen, it then prints your ballot on paper, in big friendly easy to read lettering. You then feed that into another machine. There's the e-voting, as well as paper ballot paper trail.
WHY does anyone need electronic voting in the first place? How much of an inconvenience is it to make a mark next to your choice on a piece of paper? I feel like there is some insane American reason to make voting machines but I can't comprehend it.
In Florida, our ballets are very long legal pieces of paper and can sometimes be 7-8 pages worth... So I definitely see the appeal here. The font is tiny for the population, as well. A lot of our population has problems filling the bubbles too (because of varying physical conditions).
Ballot marking devices are riskier than hand-marked ballots. A forthcoming study found that few people check what the machines print out, and even fewer actually report discrepancies to poll workers.
I'd say a combination of this idea plus a mandatory hand count of a random sample of, say, 2% of the ballots from each machine to make sure the results are similar.
Remember "hanging chads" and "pregnant chads" [1]? Those were machine-countable paper ballots which could be hand-counted in case of a challenge. Replace the punch-card ballot machine by pencil marks and the discussion will go over whether a specific field is just smeared or marked, whether a mark just outside the designated field still counts as a mark, etc. In short, paper voting ballots are better than this digital nightmare but they come with their own set of problems.
>the discussion will go over whether a specific field is just smeared or marked, whether a mark just outside the designated field still counts as a mark,
This is a solved problem. In my precinct in Virginia, any mark inside the bubble counts as valid. If you accidentally put a stray mark in one selection and intentionally fill in another for a single-choice contest, the scanner machine will reject your ballot and notify the poll worker about your overvote. If you marked outside the bubble, the machine will reject your ballot as an undervote.
I like the system in Massachusetts: you fill out a paper ballot and feed it into a slot where it's scanned optically and deposited in a locked container. The ballot has circles you fill in with a provided marker (like standardized tests).
Automation and digitalization of the voting process bring little advantage (speed) to a process where publicity, transparency, accountability need to happen slowly and to consolidate slowly, for the partial & full results to be trusted.
The UK, and in particular the north east are well worth looking into here. All paper ballots, no counting machinery, 30,000 voters (smaller than Iowa but of a similar order of magnitude), voting from across the constituency (no cramming into halls), pretty much zero fraud. Accurate results within two hours of the polls closing.
The ballots are also kept and can be verified by the voters after the fact.
No state in America has any excuse for running an election less effectively than Sunderland.
To elaborate on this, the entire country does this on the same day to vote in our general elections and it scales to 70m+ people without any issue. The reference to the North East and Sunderland is that they are usually the first to declare around 2 hours after the polls have closed. Most other constituencies take between 7 and 12 hours to count votes through the night.
The UK has very simple ballots, though: one bit of paper, one pile to count. America has a whole raft of issues voted at the same time, which complicates counting sufficiently that machines are more attractive.
Typically you’ll only be dealing with elections: General Election, Local Election, Mayoral Election, Regional Parliament Election, (until recently) European Parliament election.
Each of these is a different piece of paper, but on any given Election Day it’s rare (but not unheard of) to see three at once.
UK is under a parliamentary system; effectively, the only vote is to select your local representative. Everything else (who wins the Government, what issues get passed, etc.) is derived from this single point.
> UK is under a parliamentary system; effectively, the only vote is to select your local representative
That's true at the level of national government, but there are separate elections for different levels of government.
It's as if in the US you voted just for the House of Representatives, the Senate was unelected (which, get, historically it was) and the House elected the President.
Instead, the US started out with the same thing, except we elect an entire separate body (because we still didn't trust the people to do that, plus we wanted to make sure that citizens of slave states were overrepresented in executive elections as well as in the Senate) just to elect the President, and then later we decided to make the Senate accountable directly to the state electorate, too.
Apps could be a valuable tool if we were willing to really change how we vote: put candidates in order of preference. Doing that on paper is not intuitive. The problem is, established politicians and politicos know and prefer the complex game that they know: one vote + electoral college.
The issue is that, if one cannot reasonably trust a voting process, the vote is null in effect.
Humans cannot trust what they cannot understand and cannot verify.
A paper-based voting procedure, and counting procedure provide these guarantees: understanding and verification, through real-time, peer-based counting & review.
Any other automatic system cannot bring, at this point, the same guarantees, where you have to trust: 1) the people/system that built the system, 2) the process they used that ensures against any wrong-doing.
It is low-tech. And that's a good thing. No high-tech alternative provides the same value & the same guarantees at the same time.
You’d be surprised. The UK had a referendum on this in 2011, where the scheme was rejected without controversy, and the “no” argument I remember from the time was that this is too complicated: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternat...
And yes, I am aware this system is already used in many places.
The only real argument against it is that you have to pay people to pay by hand, but I sincerely doubt that amount of manual labor costs more than an app.
It seems like it would be much, much easier to cheat, no? Yes a few people have to be in on it, but if the history of American politics has shown us anything; that's doable.
It's actually really hard, because the ballots are kept and can be verified by the voters. Keeping a full paper trail is a great protection against fraud.
Not to mention the sheer amount of people you have to convince if you want to have any meaningful impact. And not just to cheat, but also keep quiet about it lest you get caught.
What's that old Ben Franklin quote, three people can keep a secret but only if two of them are dead?
It's also really easy to verify in parallel. Two or three separate reporters per jurisdiction phone in to physically separate tabulating centers, tabulating centers cross-check and verify at the end.
That's how the president, the parlament, and the local governments are elected in Lithuania, a country of the size of Iowa. It takes 10 minutes to set up a new private limited company online, but all votes in the elections are still counted by hand.
They have to report first alignment, second alignment, and state delegate equivalent counts for each precinct; assuming you only need columns for 20 candidates for the first alignment and half of that for the second alignment and SDE count, and using optimal alignment and assuming each figure needs no more than one square and standard 8½”×11” sheets of 1/4” graph paper, you'd need about 22 pages for the first alignment and 11 each for the second alignment and SDE count to record the raw precinct numbers, so you're off by about an order of magnitude.
And, of course, graph paper doesn't address the need to rapidly aggregate the numbers, either physically (in space) or analytically (to get totals). Or to reconcile them for inconsistencies between the three dimensions. (Which is the whole point of the new reporting requirements imposed on the IDP, and, according to the IDP, the actual source of delays.)
And, of course, using #2 pencil for the records has its own problems as far as security goes.
They did count votes by hand (there's no other choice in a caucus).
This app was simply to aggregate the results more quickly than hundreds of phone calls. It was just a cheap app that was inadequately tested.
It's a bummer but hardly a crisis for democracy, and not really relevant to discussions of technology for vote counting in primaries or general elections.
There's a hand paper trail too of voter preference cards from each round that we can go check. The app is there to speed reporting so that the info about the winners can get out there faster.
It's not enough for the vote to be secure. It's not even enough for it to be provable. It needs to be understandably secure. As in: every moderately intelligent person must be able to understand how the process works, end-to-end.
While it's enough for cars, for example, to get approval from some trusted authority, we can see in this thread how that's not enough for elections: recent US elections are somewhat trustworthy, from what I can tell[0]. Yet a significant number of people don't trust them. While scepticism can be useful to keep the process honest, it comes with a price: lack of trust gives license, for example, for people to ignore election results by questioning their legitimacy. People drop out of the democratic process, feel less bound by law, and start skirting civil responsibilities, from paying taxes to jury duty. Lacking trust in the potential for "peaceful revolution" at the next election, they seek other means of representation, up to and including extremism and violence.
To add another European example: Germany has a polling place just about every block, at least in cities. In 10+ elections, I have never waited in line more than five minutes. After polling closes at 6pm, you can stick around/come back and observe the counting. The times where I did so, there were maybe ten other people also observing, and we were free to walk around and get as close as we wanted. With a polling place serving just a few hundred people, you can watch and independently count the votes of at least one party. Later that night, you can compare your count with the number on the published spreadsheet.
That's only one party's votes, in one of tens of thousands of polling places. But get a few trusted friends, or do it repeatedly over the years, and you rather rapidly get statistically significant evidence.
The only difficulty for the US would be the insane amount of individual votes, from ballot initiatives to dog catcher (not any longer, I know; but similar).
[0]: Apart from the well-known and completely legal top-down methods of election tampering, such as holding it on a workday, cutting down on polling places in specific locations to increase commute and waiting times etc.
Your last point about the 'insane amount of individual votes' is really the whole problem.
In Europe, as I understand it, you vote for a single person and that person does the rest of the voting for your area. I'm sorry if I am wrong about that or oversimplified it; that's the current state of my knowledge on the subject.
Just so you know: America started out that way too, which is why we have the 'house of representatives'. The framers of the constitution intended that congressional districts never exceed 50K to 60K thousand. Unfortunately the average congressional district in America is currently about 700K.
Voting for someone to represent me and my closest 699,999 friends is barely a vote at all. With congressional districts that large (not to mention fcking gerrymandering) you are not really voting along with your peers. People are grouped together in strange ways.
Also, Germany is 1/4th the size of the US and the UK is 1/5th the size of the US.
The net result is; Americans are not accurately represented at a national level.
When you combine that with the fact that we pride ourselves on our independence and individuality; taking away our ability* to cast votes on local issues is probably not going to fly. If anything I'm guessing we'd want more power to vote individually. Two of the last five presidents who were elected were not chosen by the majority of the population.
I think a simpler solution like paper ballots and many polling places might help, but, the sheer manpower to make sure that goes well would be a massive undertaking. As I said, many multiples larger than in some European countries.
Having an explainable (to your point) system that is open and exhaustively tested is one path to avoid the current mess we find ourselves in.
I agree with that to a degree. The problem is we are trading off technical problems for corruption. For counting things, it seems like computers would be a good fit.
>For counting things, it seems like computers would be a good fit.
You could keep the computers but you also have the papers sealed in boxes. Then you can manually check 1-5% of the votes and make sure the machines are correct. Or if someone contests the count and a judge decides the reasons are fair you can count again all the votes in that polling station.
For counting pieces of paper, machines sound like a good fit. Any capabilities beyond the literal needs (i.e., counting) sound like an invitation for mistakes and corruption. Your phone has 100,000 times as much memory as the Apollo Guidance Computer, but nobody would ever use a smartphone for actual spacecraft guidance.
UNIVAC famously analyzed the 1952 presidential election. Today we've got about twice as many voters, so maybe get a computer twice as powerful as a UNIVAC.
The naivety on the part of the various parties involved here is breathtaking.
It is interesting to observe how little distinction non-technical users are aware of between high quality and comically buggy software because of the ease of producing flashy UIs these days. They have no idea how the sausage gets made. No idea.
I have never seen a stronger case for the need to have third-party certification and testing of software and the people involved in building it.
I'm getting voted down for mentioning this in another section of this discussion, but, is this not the perfect use case for open source? The certification is anyone and everyone can double check the source code. If this is a bad idea, I would appreciate the feedback, because, it is my understanding that a big draw of using OSS is transparency.
"Open source" has a couple different related meanings, and it's not clear exactly which aspect you mean, or how it would help here.
- A license which allows the source code to be redistributed under the same terms as it was received? The problem with these boxes isn't that people can't redistribute it.
- A collaborative model for creating software? Possibly -- though there have been some high-profile cases of security issues sneaking into these, too. Modern voting machines also seem to have a huge stack of dependencies, which mean the surface area for exploit is much larger than the voting software itself. Would you require a fully open-source stack, and how far down?
OSS is great for transparency for the person receiving the software (in this case, the jurisdictions operating the machines), but if those people don't care to audit it (or redistribute it to others who wish to), that doesn't buy them anything.
I'd much rather see a rule requiring voting software to be publicly viewable by any voter in the jurisdiction, regardless of the software license it's sold under.
Transparency, an open license, collaboration, distribution, best practices and more.
Clearly I do not expect districts to independently inspect and verify source code any more that we are inspecting and verifying the web server running this website.
Computers (or at a minimum binaries) could be distributed and have self checking as the boot. They could simply be used to tally paper ballots (as others have mentioned) or to transmit votes.
The overarching point is if we can do 5 trillion dollars of electronic money transfers worldwide per DAY certainly we can use open source to accurately, securely and transparently count and tally votes.
Do we need even more governmental oversight? I would like to see a bulletproof technological solution that I personally can verify if I choose to.
For something like public voting I agree. But it would be a hard sell to get a lot of companies to pay for software development and release the source because their competitors would get it for free.
I could be wrong, but, I have to believe that there are developers who would donate their time to something as fundamental to democracy as voting. Grassroots, not corporate funded. A corporate funded voting system feels like what we already have.
"I have never seen a stronger case for the need to have third-party certification and testing of software and the people involved in building it."
Are you proposing that every GitHub repository be certified by a third-party and tested before use? Besides, "high quality" software like Google Maps or iOS don't have anything close to "third-party certification".
I'm saying that if software developers are going to be solving problems that are this closely connected with the public interest and safety then they should be held to industry or regulatory standards on par with the ones faced by engineers building airplanes and bridges.
The DNC literally argued in court that they have no obligation to conduct fair elections, can just do whatever they want with back room deals and call it legitimate, so I don’t see that happening:
The surprising part is that they had to argue that; that was the practice of every major party (only ever two at a time, but more than two over history), openly, until after 1968, and it was PR, not law changes, which got them to even pretend to make some gestures toward fairness.
I guess the gist of it is there's a difference between a Party's Primary election process and a National or State election. The Party is treated like a private club that can do whatever it wants in its Primars to select its candidate for the general election.
The naivety is in adding error-checking on top of a caucus process with a notoriously complex set of rules that have been executed by hand, by humans at over a thousand different precincts for many decades, and then hold up the results when -- shocker -- you realize a large number of precincts are reporting results that show evidence of mistakes or inconsistent interpretation of the rules.
Any commercial software company with thousands of data entry users would regard it as a massive mistake to suddenly, overnight, begin rejecting all data that wasn't in compliance with a complex set of rules that most people can't explain. You'd bring a smoothly running business to a grinding, embarrassing halt.
Of course all the individual precinct officials whose result were rejected are going to blame the app. Why not? The makers of the app didn't have a mandate to fix the caucus process. And of course when people's accuracy and competence are called into question they will do everything they can to discredit the source.
I don't know if that's what happened, but it's consistent with what we're observing: the state office is saying they're trying to resolve inconsistencies in the returns, and the precincts are blaming the app.
The right thing to do would have been to use software to measure the prevailing level of data quality and compliance with the state official's interpretation of the rules, and decide later whether to do anything about it in 2024, if ever.
American party nominations have been, are currently, and will forever be a total Charlie Foxtrot.
The Democratic 1860 Conventions were so bad they decided to put up two candidates, had to do it over a few times, had many walkouts, and effectively seceded Lincoln the Presidency and engulfed the nation in war as a result. It was so bad it literally was a cause of the Civil War.
The 1912 Republican Convention literally split the party, with the fisticuffs and black eyes to prove it. Edumnd Morris has a good bit on that one and the hijinks, corruption, vote-selling, and smoke filled rooms in his Theodore Rex series. To us today, it's ghastly.
I think it was the 1952 National Conventions that really exposed to the public what a mess it all is, as they were the first ones to be televised. During the process people intentionally lit newspapers on fire in order to cause chaos (my memory is a bit fuzzy here though).
The 1964 Republican convention at SF's Cow Palace, dubbed Conservative Woodstock, was more of a Nazi rally than anything else. Reporters had racial and sexist slurs screamed at them until they ran for their lives.
The state caucuses are a reflection of these conventions and America itself; drunken, insane, corrupt, spectacle.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. I think people inside the apparatus of both parties see the arcane and chaotic aspects of the process as their chance to put their fingers on the scales, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's what this brouhaha in Iowa is about -- a fight between people at the precinct level who want to maintain their power to influence the results by interpreting the rules this way or that, and people at the state level who want to iron out these "irregularities" (probably while maintaining any power they have at the state level to perpetrate similar shenanigans.)
The public can and should put pressure on the parties to adopt more legible and transparent processes.
From what I was reading, many of the people responsible for reporting the results hadn't even downloaded the app until the night of, or if they had, hadn't ever logged into it on their phones.
From story in the Guardian [1] "State party officials had said they would not be sending the new mobile app to precinct chairs for downloading until just before the caucuses to narrow the window for any interference."
It gets worse! From updated story at same url (so annoying!) "Workers were reportedly expected to download a file to their Android phones, enable a setting that allows for the installation of apps from untrusted sources, and then bypass prompts warning that doing so could cause a security breach."
I know nothing about the app itself, but clearly the process around deploying it was a fiasco. We really need competent people running elections.
Pretty sure this is just the standard process for "side-loading" apps onto Android phones. (By the way, the ability to do this is sometimes cited here on HN as a strength of the Android system vs. iOS.)
The primary sin here by the party and app developers seems to be far too much belief in the power of obscurity. A well-coded app with a good authentication scheme could have been distributed through app stores weeks in advance and it would not have made any difference to the security--but would have made a huge difference in testing and user on-boarding.
The app commonly used for Democratic campaign on-ground canvassing, known as MiniVAN, is vetted, works well, and available through proper channels. There is no reason that that couldn't have been the case here. For something as mission-critical as this, the process to obtain the application involved needs to be clear as day. Most Android users do not sideload applications because of the inherent security risks. There are just colossal fuckups all the way down and a clear chain of incompetence at the core of this debacle.
In other words, the Android app was delivered as an .apk file and not available on Google Play. That sounds like "security through obscurity". What about iOS devices then?
Or, maybe, a lesson technologists should internalize when we advocate technical solutions to real world problems.
Apple moved a reply button on the iPhone email app -- and I know someone that for weeks just thought it was broken and would text responses to emails entirely out of context.
To be fair, the button was still there and still had the same icon. It's bad design for other reasons, but I'm not sure how you could think it was completely broken just because it moved a couple dozen pixels to the right.
- State campaign finance records indicate the Iowa Democratic Party paid Shadow, a tech company that joined with ACRONYM last year, more than $60,000 for “website development” over two installments in November and December of last year.
- The Iowa Democratic Party had refused to reveal details about the app, including the company behind it and what security measures were being taken to safeguard the results, arguing that it made the technology more vulnerable to hackers.
- In 2018, the group funded an onslaught of ads on platforms like Facebook and Google.
I was recently asked by a friend to help my local county's Democrats to evaluate and recommend a volunteer organizing app. I sort of expected a medium-sized non-profit with some What I found was an all-volunteer group that is incredibly dedicated, but under-resourced with an extremely shallow tech bench and no technical leadership whatsoever. I saw things that made me shudder as a developer:
- Nobody knows how to use the CMS, so no new content in months.
- Their site lists a dated version of their team, with _personal_ emails on the public web, since nobody knows how how to set up new mail accounts under their domain. They get destroyed with spam.
- I overhead a volunteer clicking really rapid fire, like 100 times in a minute. I probed a bit and found that is how they send out messages. Its something straight out of the excellent "How to Automate the Boring Stuff"
- All data has to be manually entered into 2 systems, and they want to add a 3rd.
All of those things and 100 others could be fixed expediently, but there is literally nobody to do it, and no committee that handles that role. My day job in a journalistic organization means I really cannot engage in partisan political work, but I'm just itching to help.
If you are progressively-minded and want to make a difference in 2020 elections, please show up and help. There is plenty of work to be done, and shockingly few volunteers or staff with the skills you have, HN reader.
If you are technically-minded and want to make a difference, please show up and help. Whatever your political spectrum, you can make a huge difference in a campaign by personally selecting who you align with or believe in, then going and helping. Our capabilities can organize groups and maximize the time of volunteers who are not technically savvy.
I have worked on a few campaigns and my skill sets were invaluable to getting candidate voices heightened.
Just call people by phone and read off some numbers from paper. Then confirm them by reading them the other way round. Yes, it is actually that easy!!! People have transmitted vote counts this way forever, long before apps were a thing.
You can even use your goddamn smartphone to make the call, if you need that in order to feel "modern" enough. But don't make a shitty app for every one-time event that doesn't need a hundred additional failure modes for essentially no benefit whatsoever.
The backup plan was to call in. However, they only had 12 callers ready to take calls, for ~1800 precincts. At 3 minutes per call, that is 7+ hours to call in the results.
They should have rather invested a tiny share of the money spent on that dysfunctional app on one of those gig working websites to rent themselves some personnel for the evening to take calls. Could have even marketed that as "Woah, see how INNOVATIVE and MODERN we are, we're using this gig working thing!".
Combine that with renting a solid and battle-tested VoIP solution for a few days to supply the short-term workers with (soft-)phones and the precincts with numbers to call, the story gets even better from a marketing perspective - now they could add the punchline "See, we're using INTERNET TELEPHONY hosted in THE CLOUD!".
Additionally, the results phone number was the same as the helpdesk phone number. This means that everyone that was having trouble with the app was calling the same number that everyone was using to report numbers.
Other states couldn’t care less what the Iowa constitution says on the matter.
In practice it’s ultimately up to the DNC (this is a party process after all). In the past if a state threatened to disobey the party the party would just say the state’s delegates wouldn’t count or would count for less. Iowa’s constitution has no governance over DNC policies and practices which at the end of the day are a private matter.
> Not sure how you can change that without having them change that law.
You can change by having either of the national parties set rules about primary/caucus timing and declaring that they won't seat delegates chosen out of line with those rules.
Heck, the whole reason Iowa has to report more dimensions of data this year is a DNC rule (not on timing, obviously) adopted in response to complaints about the results last cycle. So we know the party committees rules do direct the administration of state nominating contests.
This is a state law, not federal. Iowa state law has no standing over other states. If the DNC decides Nevada would be first, what options does Iowa have?
Legally what would happen is any time another state moves in front of Iowa the date for the Iowa caucuses would move up. The power is actually the other way around the DNC has to get Iowa to give up and revoke/ignore the law in their own state to put another state in front of/with Iowa. Any state can move their own date around the best the DNC can do is maybe refuse to acknowledge delegates from states that skip the line but that's a very big button to press.
> It's up to each party to set the rules on how delegates can be selected, including time, place, and manner.
It seems that Iowa chose both, the time and the manner, itself[1]:
> Because Iowa had a complex process of precinct caucuses, county conventions, district conventions, and a state convention, they chose to start early. In 1972, Iowa was the first state to hold its Democratic caucus, and it had the first Republican caucus four years later.
> Under Iowa law, political parties are required to hold caucuses every two years to select delegates to county conventions and party committees.
And each party must respect the laws of the state.
> It seems that Iowa chose both, the time and the manner, itself
Well, no, not entirely. Yes, the parties gave them lots of room initially, but that has evolved. The entire reason they were using the app at issue this year is because after complaints about apparent inconsistencies in the results based on internal reports (there was previously no official tally of the intermediate steps), the DNC directed that to the Iowa Democratic Party must adapt the method so that there were official, reported tallies of the first and second alignments as well as the state delegate equivalent count that is the final result. That is, the national party chose (in a very limited way, for now) to exercise it's fairly absolute power to direct the manner by which delegates to it's nominating conventions are selected. (Aside from this specific intervention, the DNC also has extensive general rules adopted for the delegate selection process, see, for 2020, generally Regulation 4 of the Regulations of the Rules and Bylaws Committee for the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
There is nothing stopping the DNC from making much more exacting requirements, including setting a required schedule or prohibiting the use of caucuses entirely.
> And each party must respect the laws of the state.
Each party has an incentive to do so to avoid conflict with interest groups in the state, but state governments have basically no compulsory power to direct how party national committees allow delegates to nominating conventions to be selected from their state.
Since Iowa holds a caucus, not a primary, it does not apply to New Hampshire's law. Iowa's law says the caucus must be "[a]t least eight days earlier than the scheduled date for any state meeting, caucus, or primary that constitutes the first determining stage of the presidential nominating process in any other state." New Hampshire requires "7 days or more immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election." Apparently the caucus is not considered a similar election.
Most states don't even have caucuses, just more traditional primaries. I'm pretty confident this app is quite specific to the (democratic - republican process is different) caucuses in Iowa.
Other states have tried to go before Iowa in the past--being the first state to vote has significant benefits to the local economy, as campaigns spend ad dollars, hire local teams, deploy ground efforts that eat in local restaurants, etc.
In the past, the parties have essentially prevented those states' election date moves. That stance could change.
While states set the dates themselves they generally only do so with consent of the parties. In the past the Democratic Party has supported Iowa in going first. After yesterday’s fiasco that stance will likely change.
People have been talking about it for a while. Iowa is really really white [0] so people have been saying for a long time that maybe the first state (or group of states) should be more representative of the country as a whole.
Having built an app that was used for a one time event by a group of people that weren't necessarily tech savvy, I do empathize with the situation.
However, If I had $63,000 to build a solution (a price mentioned in a wsj article), I think there are better ways to do this without an app. The problem with relying on an app for a one-time, time-sensitive event is that you'll ultimately run into people that don't know how to download the app, have a phone that can't run the app, don't remember how to authenticate, or are simply confused as to how to use it. No matter how many emails you send out before hand reminding people to install the app and how to use it, some amount of people simply ignore it.
This was a hard lesson my wife and I learned on our wedding night.
For pictures, instead of a Polaroid style camera (which I had bought originally for the purpose but we decided against it later) we thought it would be great if people could use their own phones to take their own reception pictures and then print them off a Bluetooth photo printer we brought, and then put those pictures into a photo guestbook.
Instead, no one could get the app downloaded or working (well almost no one) the night of, and one person in the wedding party had to act as a technology liaison and get pictures from other people, then print them from his phone.
We ended up with around 14 pictures in the photo guestbook.
If we had just gone with the polaroid camera we probably would have had 3 or 4 times that many pictures.
All because we assumed the technology would work as easily as we were able to get it working at home, for everyone else.
If we're optimizing for low bandwidth the app they went with is even better (with captains actually preloading) because all you have to pass is the auth and results information no html at all...
Am I right in thinking the app is used by one person per precinct as well? I'm surprised they hadn't tested even at this scale, we're not talking hundreds of thousands of events a second here, surely. It's hard to imagine how they could be under resourced and untested for a really predictable amount of simultaneous traffic.
I mean, Snapchat could handle the scale of this without a sweat, but you tell 1600 retirees to download it and post a picture (with no training) and provide them a support telephone number, I suspect you'll end up with less than 100 pictures and more than a thousand phone calls.
The question is whether the problem is a question of misunderstood usage (by the users) or an inability for the backend to handle the load. If it was the former, that’s at least understandable, for the reasons you said, though they still should have practiced it. If it’s the latter, that’s pretty inexcusable, given that they knew precisely the amount of load and that it’s a fairly low amount. I’m pretty sure a naive implementation of any backend for this could handle the load (1600 precincts each reporting a picture over the course of an hour), unless there’s some requirement of this that I’m missing.
Either way, this is a pretty good indictment of this entire idea. Stick with what worked for hundreds of years, don’t try “solutions” to non-problems.
But a simple CRUD website wouldn't reasonably cost $60k and the company needed to justify to pricetag. Not saying there is a conspiracy but there is big money in politics and they wanted a piece of it.
The interface was the confusing part, not the responsiveness. Caucus precinct chiefs skew older, the app was not part of their training, and they waited until the last minute to download.
This doesn’t really seem like something to pin on the app exclusively - it’s a change management failure on the part of the party, underlined by the fact that even their normal phone lines were overloaded due to new data reporting requirements.
I wasn’t on the ground or anything (I’m a complete outsider who read the news) but this seems like a lot to pin on some app developers when the issues were spread pretty far. It’s damnably hard to train 1800 users spread across a state with varying levels of experience.
> normal phone lines were overloaded due to new data reporting requirements.
I suspect their phone lines were overloaded because they optimistically assumed the app would handle the majority of the reporting. When Plan A failed, there was a knock-on effect on Plan B, causing it to subsequently fail.
Correction: as more info comes in, it looks like there were also actual bugs in the software that were tallying things improperly. Change management is still hard but baseline stuff seemed to be a problem.
I am confused as of how this can even be a problem. If there are just reporting actual results, even the most mediocre website running on an old server would go through a few thousands submissions in milliseconds.
Granted, I have seen elephants drowning in a teacup in corporate IT, but not to that extent.
From the reports, it seems that they made a priority of secrecy - they intentionally prevented people from knowing about it ahead of time.
Who knows why they felt that secrecy was so important - but this seems to be a touchstone of the governing class. Even in an election - what should be the most open event in our entire society - they're trying to be gatekeepers of information.
That is the tally sheet used by the precinct captain and secretary to calculate the viability number (the number of supporters needed for candidate to earn a delegate) and then the apportionment of delegates based on supporters.
My precinct had these on the table where the staff was coordinating the caucus.
I think the point is that the pin code to login to the app is printed on the top right corner of the tally sheet. Now that various people have been posting photos of tally sheets online - in the case of this tweet, a staffer for Paul Buttigieg - the concern is that members of the public have been trying out the app and pin codes just to see if it would work, and modifying the submitted numbers.
Though according to the spokeswoman for the Iowa Democrats in the NYTimes article, they don't believe any of the 3 reporting discrepancies are the result of an intrusion.
We're not talking web-scale here, either. There are 1,600 caucus sites in Iowa. My understanding is that only the organizers/officials even need this on their phones. So we're talking on the order of 10-20k users, max.
My intuition is that the bigger problem is with the caucus format itself, and especially the new rule changes. The app, with its strict data entry requirements, likely didn't cover a lot of corner cases and so people had to call in to ask what to do. There was one caucus on TV last night that had problems because a bunch of people left after first alignment and organizers didn't know how to tally their votes.
When some confusion -- any confusion -- happens, that doesn't fit into the app's forms, people are not going to trust it and will revert to calling the IDP/DNC offices to see how to proceed.
This makes more sense to me than actually the app melting down under load which was implied from some reporting.
Then if the Iowa DNC (or whoever) didn't staff up the phones to the usual levels as expecting most results to come through the app, you can kind of get to how something this ridiculous happened...
Either way it's a complete lack of pretty basic testing/training, whether it's with real life users or the scale of the app, or whatever it was, they seem like pretty preventable problems from the outside looking in.
Testing is more than making sure the code works - you have to understand how it will be used, who will use it, how it is designed to be used by them, and even is the app even necessary. This sounds like no one gave much thought to any of this.
Not quite 'votes'. Its delegates being chosen in a caucus. Different from a vote, in that 'one person-one vote' isn't how it works. You go stand in a group that wants a delegate chosen for a candidate. If your group is too small to earn a delegate, then you wander away to a larger group. Or maybe combine two small groups and wrangle which candidate your delegate will 'declare' for.
And yes, paper documents were created this year to facilitate counting/recounting.
I am reminded of Senator Romney's campaign's ill-fated ORCA[0] from 2012, which was apparently not well-tested prior to rollout. Seems like technical-project failure does not respect party lines.
How much more secure would it be for precincts to phone in the results? Phone numbers are trivial to spoof. Perhaps the party headquarters could call the precincts instead of the precincts calling the headquarters. But that still leaves questions about the security of the telephone system itself, even with the spoofing issue out of the way. Are there any alternatives other than phoning in the results?
Interesting difference in the numbers, Pete's camp was talking about 77% of their captains reporting vs Sanders reporting (roughly) how many actual precincts they they had results from. Makes it really hard to think about who has the more accurate numbers.
Nor does Buttigeig declaring victory before any results have been reported and his comms director tweeting out internal election tallying forms with some kind of PIN data that I imagine should’ve been kept concealed:
In my precinct (suburb west of Des Moines) there were observers from the Buttigieg, Yang, Sanders, and Warren campaign. After the first tally, the precinct captains for the campaigns (the people working the room for votes) would run to the back of the room where the observers were standing and report their tally. The Yang and Buttigieg observers would then use some app on their phone, presumably to report these numbers to their campaign.
None of that seems abnormal, Buttigieg's claim to victory is based on him winning by the equivalent of an exit poll.
Declaring victory under these circumstances is certainly abnormal. And moreso in Pete’s case since the group developing the app appear to have been paid by and in favor of his campaign. I don’t even think Sanders should’ve done this in response to Buttigeig.
Reporting bias, not every precinct has candidate support and the precincts with support are the ones most likely to report those numbers back to the campaign.
Feels very scummy of Pete to declare victory in the absence of data. He's basically taking advantage of the confusion to lay claim to some of the polling boost associated with a win.
How is there not widespread open source software for voting out there? It seems like this type of problem could be avoided by creating public software.
Because electronic voting is a solution looking for a problem. Paper voting works and has worked for centuries. There's no need to bring apps/smartphones/whatever into this equation.
There should be, but it’s not just a case of “build it and they will come”. The major parties would need to actually use it (in at least a few states) and for that to happen I think it would need some prominent backers (which could be the parties themselves).
I’m just guessing it was a combination of (1) an app could be distributed / authorized to only specific email addresses, so far less chance of interruption than you’d get if the website got leaked to the public, and (2) wanting to simplify the reporting logistics by just having people use their private phones, rather than having to set up laptops and internet, and possibly (3) an attempt to stick a toe into the realm of widespread voting by app.
Of course there’s always the possibility it’s a simple matter of (4) someone lobbying politicians into giving money to his brother to slap together an app, because government money.
Having the most votes in the party caucuses is definitely not equivalent to having the best chance to win the election, where you have to appeal to a different set of voters.
The major deficiency of the two-party system is that the parties have to resort to this kind of second-guessing the "average voter" instead of just presenting all the options and letting the voters choose for themselves.
In most democracies that don’t suffer from the two-party system, there is as far as I’m aware nothing like the American primary/caucus system. The parties just decide who their candidates are with no input from anyone but dues-paying party members.
The last UK leadership election for the Labour Party [0] had a turnout of 500k+, or roughly 1% of the population. I won't bore you with the details of whether it's correct to think of all 500k as "dues-paying members".
That's a lot less than the 30 million or 10% of population [1] who voted in the last Democratic primaries in 2016, but not "nothing like" it. And we could pick other years the turnout was much lower, e.g. 7 million [2] in 2012 where Obama did not have meaningful opposition).
UK is not a good counterexample here. It also uses the first-past the post voting system, which trends towards two parties since any third party becomes a spoiler.
With a different voting system there would be a wider range of smaller parties, so you don't need to wrest control of a major party to be represented.
It seems there are people in the Democratic establishment that would rather have 4 more years of Trump than elect a non-establishment Democrat they can't control. At least with Trump they can spend 4 years pointing to him and saying what a disaster he is to better position themselves for next election.
And I would even argue that it's not always best to go with the person who gets the most votes amongst the Democrats. Most Democrats and Republicans will vote for their party in the election, no matter who the nominee is.
So I would think the best person to win the election would be a candidate that is able to get the most support from across the aisle, from Independents and Republicans.
This election, it seems like the top candidates for that are Yang, Biden, or Tulsi, based on what few articles I can find on the matter.
But it doesn't seem like the DNC cares about that as much as long as one of the establishment candidates wins the nomination (Biden, Buttigieg, Warren, Kloubuchar).
>> Most Democrats and Republicans will vote for their party in the election, no matter who the nominee is.
>> So I would think the best person to win the election would be a candidate that is able to get the most support from across the aisle, from Independents and Republicans.
Well that means picking a candidate specifically for the swing votes, which may be very different than what party members want. In other words someone that almost nobody likes. But hey, they can win. Because people will vote their party regardless.
Washington's warning rings true in this case. The really odd side-effect, though maybe not unpredictable, is the amount of people who voice approach along the lines of 'burn it all down, start from scratch'. Sentiment like that must be scary to the existing powers. That said, I have no idea how common that is.
The weirdest thing about it is that Trump seems very much result of this trend.
I agree that it's bad to make a quick leap into conspiratorial thinking, but many Bernie supporters still have a bad taste in their mouths from 2016, when the DNC essentially conspired with the Clinton campaign to stop Bernie. That's the lens these moments are viewed with.
>“The agreement — signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and [Clinton campaign manager] Robby Mook with a copy to [Clinton campaign counsel] Marc Elias— specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised,” Brazile wrote in the story under the headline “Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC.”
>Brazile added of the deal: “[Clinton’s] campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.”
Yeah, irrelevant. The fact that this was spun as some sort of conspiracy is a massive indictment on how naive Bernie supporters are.
Meanwhile, there's an actual international conspiracy to hand-pick a president from our enemies and the Sanders folks don't make a peep. Instead, they boo John Lewis. Disgusting.
Ironically, the DNC did not conspiratorially help Clinton against Bernie, you just quoted another bit of weaponized disinformation used by the right to divide the left.
Let me be frank: Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 nomination fair and square and there was no rigging, no conspiracy and no cheating going on.
If you think otherwise, you've been lied to by propaganda and disinformation, and you should question every source that led you to that conclusion, because those sources will be working in 2020 to do worse.
- Brazile now says she found “no evidence” the primary was rigged.
- Warren now says that though there was “some bias” within the DNC, “the overall 2016 primary process was fair.”
- “I found nothing to say they were gaming the primary system,” Brazile told me.
In fact, smart insiders believe that the "invisible primary" of democratic insiders hurt everyone BUT Bernie, because they got rid of all of the moderate competition like Biden, and gave Bernie a clear path as an outsider to being the #2 in the race, something he would have struggled to attain without the insider winnowing.
You mean Brazile, the one who leaked town hall questions ahead of time to Clinton?
edit: I'm not a Bernie supporter so it doesn't really bother me, I just found it amusing that you're quoting Donna Brazile here. Who was responsible for one of the clear, actual offenses against Bernie in 2016 for which she was forced to resign from CNN only to be rewarded with being head of the DNC. Well if she says everything was fine, I guess I better reconsider my sources...
Let me be frank: I don't give a shit if candidates got questions for a town hall (not a debate!) an hour before hand.
Personally, I prefer when questions go out beforehand so we get more thoughtful answers. "Gotcha" style questions require candidates to rote-practice certain political speeches and stock answers, and those rapid fire live questions devolve into stump speeches every time.
But getting questions to a town hall is not rigging a primary. It's not even close.
I was responding to someone who literally said the caucuses were rigged by the DNC to hurt Bernie. Read the thread please!
And for the record: Biden has never called this process rigged at all. Your link shows him rightfully criticizing the many failures including the technology failures.
Bernie's fans on reddit and beyond are certainly using the "rig" word just like Donald's fans are though!
You do realize that the Iowa Democrats who prefer Bernie or Pete are the SAME DEMOCRATS running this process right?
There is no national party there. The people running this are Iowans. If they, as you say, prefer Bernie or Pete, then why would they be intentionally hurting their own guys?
I wish people would learn about these processes so they could think through their own disinformation! What you're saying literally doesn't make sense.
Why would Iowans who you claim are mainly Pete/Bernie followers help Biden by sabotaging their own caucuses?
Rigging is not the right term for what's happening but you have to admit that if Pete or Bernie end up winning Iowa and Biden ends up 4th, delaying the results will dampen the impact of the outcome. Nate Silver just pushed an article about the impact of timing of the primaries on the outcome. Then you have to so factor in the Des Moines poll getting pulled, which supposedly showed Biden coming in 4th.
