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.

From what I heard, it means that the volunteer captains are old people who don’t know how to download apps, and they preferred dialing a phone number.

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....

Assuming they set it up properly and/or use multiple sheets, a single sheet for 20+ people can get real messy and hard to audit.

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.

They probably mean via a Google Form. That’s a fairly safe way (in my experience) to add inputs from many users concurrently.

Then you get into problems dealing with erroneous entries though right?

This kind of naivety is likely what brought about the entire issue in the first place.

Consultants with more budget than sense seems more likely.

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?

>Why don't they just vote via paper ballot?

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.