Iowa, we have a problem with your clearly major malfunction

Iowa Democrats had four years to prepare for their caucuses and on Monday, failed epically. For a party desperate to reclaim the White House in 2020, the Iowa Democratic Party instead looked like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.

As Monday became Tuesday, nobody could yet say who had won the first contest in one of the most important presidential elections of our lifetimes. In the void, some candidates staged faux victory rallies.

Chaos and charades.

This is how Democrats are going to defeat President Trump?

The Iowa Democratic Party blamed the meltdown on its new election app, not a nefarious hack or malware.

We beg to differ. The party’s failure to timely report accurate election results was caused by its lack of attention to detail. It failed to do the basics, such as testing and retesting the new system, training volunteers on its use and ensuring enough people on stand-by in case something went wrong.

Still, Republicans shouldn’t be too quick to point fingers. After all, in 2012, the Iowa Republican Party prematurely declared Mitt Romney the winner, when Rick Santorum had actually prevailed.

Florida can relate. We know something about botched elections caused by supervisors who fail to imagine the possibilities. In the weeks that followed the 2000 presidential election, we became a national laughingstock with our “hanging chads” and Palm Beach County’s infamous

“butterfly ballot.”

Then again, in 2012, we saw seven-hour waits at early voting sites — a result of a Republican move to limit early voting. And in 2016, two still-unnamed Florida counties were targets of attempted Russian interference. Our national intelligence leaders say the Russians are still at it, with plans to interfere again.

Iowa’s misfortune is a wake-up call to Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee to redouble her efforts to ensure a smooth and trustworthy presidential primary on March 17.

Lee has said she isn’t concerned about hackers altering the final tallies. She’s more concerned they might try to alter the unofficial real-time results reported on the internet. That could sow distrust among voters about the official count, which is tabulated on computers far removed from the worldwide web.

Another lesson from Iowa: The most reliable form of voting continues to be the old-fashioned paper ballot, the system in effect in Florida since 2008 after the state’s brief fling with touch-screen voting machines.

“Paper ballots can be audited,” says Craig Latimer, supervisor of elections in Tampa’s Hillsborough County, “and we can always go back and re-scan the ballots if there’s a question about the results.”

With this election, Iowa went from “first in the nation” to worst in the nation. Compounding the problem, party officials failed to publicly offer an explanation until 5 p.m.

Tuesday.

The fiasco temporarily obscured a far bigger problem for Democrats: early forecasts showed a disappointing turnout, on pace with that of four years ago.

This is how Democrats are going to defeat Trump?

The larger question is why Iowa matters so much in the first place. Monday’s disaster underscores the reality that this overwhelmingly white Midwestern farm state long ago outlived its usefulness in choosing presidential candidates.

Iowa’s caucuses are hailed as a showcase of grassroots activism, but they are tilted toward the most liberal elements of the Democratic Party. The evening time commitment disadvantages lower income voters with children, who may not be able to afford child care.

“Iowa is on its last breath,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Weston told reporters on Tuesday.

Wasserman Schultz favors a system that rotates which states go first in holding primaries. She’s right. The primaries should be re-ordered so that they better reflect our diverse nation. While a great many Iowans took seriously their job of vetting the candidates, there is nothing magical about their system. Rather, as we saw Monday, it’s flawed.

As the 2020 campaign intensifies, Democrats will keep driving a political message that Republicans are scheming to disenfranchise voters. In the case of Florida, where lawmakers erected barriers before a voter-approved effort to let certain former felons vote, that’s true.

But Iowa’s spectacular failure makes it more difficult for Democrats to claim the high ground on voting integrity issues, and they have no one to blame but themselves.

JOHN J. KIM/CHICAGO TRIBUNE The Iowa Democratic Party’s failure to timely report election results in the presidential primary was caused by its lack of attention to detail and failure to do the basics.