Technical issues with app derailed caucus
IOWA CITY, Iowa — What went wrong with the Iowa Democratic Party’s high-tech plan to speed up reporting of caucus results? Pretty much everything.
A little-known startup company was picked by party leaders to develop a mobile app for reporting unofficial results, with key details such as the name of the firm kept confidential. While security experts tested the program, many of the people who needed to use it at 1,678 precinct locations across Iowa had little to no training. And a “coding issue” in the app muddied the results, prompting party officials to halt reporting and move to a backup system to verify the counts.
When it came time to launch the app Monday night, there was widespread confusion and frustration. It’s similar to the sort of chaos election security experts had been warning about. But while much of the attention has been on foreign interference like Russia’s effort four years ago, the problems in Iowa highlighted how technical errors can be just as serious. It also underscored the risk of relying on voting technologies that election integrity advocates consider unreliable.
“If I were prone to Twitter, I would use the hashtag #IToldYouSo,” said University of Iowa computer science professor Douglas W. Jones, an election security expert. “It looks like the worst-case scenario happened.”
Jones, a voting security consultant and co-author of Broken Ballots, had warned before the caucuses that the Iowa Democratic Party’s plan to deploy the unproven app during the highstakes event was risky and had been undermined by excessive secrecy and a lack of public confidence in its ability.
Unlike the November election and state primaries administered by state and local election officials, the Iowa caucus was administered by the Iowa Democratic Party. On Tuesday, Nevada Democrats said they would not be using the same app or vendor for their Feb. 22 caucuses, vowing not to have the same problems.
While the app was available to caucus organizers for downloading on their smartphones a few days earlier, some waited until Monday to do so and encountered difficulties in following the instructions or received error messages. The state party had said previously it was going to delay deploying the app to reduce the risk that a hacker might target it, a decision in favor of security but creating little space for error.
“A lot of people had difficulty downloading it and were not happy when they did the test on it,” said Ruth Thompson, who chaired a precinct at Lincoln High School in Des Moines. “We came to a consensus not to use it.”
After hearing reports of long delays in answering the phone at state headquarters, Thompson and other veteran caucusgoers at her site used calculators to determine the delegate allocation and then texted a photo of the results to Polk County Democratic Party officials, who drove it to state party headquarters.
Although the app was the “preferred method” for reporting results, the party did have a phone line available for caucus organizers to report results. But that quickly became overwhelmed, with some caucus organizers reporting they were on hold for over an hour.
The reporting problems were exacerbated by a new requirement that organizers from each site gather and submit information to make the process more transparent. For the first time, each precinct collected data on the number of supporters for each candidate at the beginning of the night and then after supporters of nonviable candidates realigned to new groups.
Party officials defended their decision to delay the release of the results, saying they preferred to have accuracy over speed. But before Monday’s caucuses, they had touted the app’s automated ability to calculate delegates and report results as an improvement over the complicated math and legions of phone calls the system has long relied upon.