`There Is A Sense That The Iowa Caucuses Are In Serious Jeopardy`
As we wait for the results, I wanted to get a better sense for what happened yesterday from the inside of Iowa’s caucus process. This morning I talked with an individual who is familiar with the internal processes of the caucuses but who was not authorized to speak on the record and what they described to me was a full day, not just night, of tech problems and lack of staffing.
“They have still never seen the app. They were working tech support for the app and had never seen the app,” the person said of the party’s support staffers. They said that those who had been trained to provide support arrived before noon and “it became very apparent very fast how the app was an unmitigated disaster,” they said. “They were getting calls from people saying they couldn’t download the app.” Some of the problems, the person said, were simply precinct chairs less comfortable with technology, but they were also getting reports that the app was buggy.
Even before noon, the helpline was at a 45 call backlog, the person said. “Half the calls were the app, if not more,” they said.
Adding to the technical problems were the introduction of new rules on the fly from the party throughout the day, all before the main round of caucus voting began. “They introduced a new rule that every precinct had to take a picture of their mass worksheet and email it to an email address. This is an instruction that no one had been given ahead of time” the person told me, surmising that perhaps the party had experienced some early problems during afternoon satellite caucuses.
By the evening, when results began to flow in, it became apparent that not just the app was problematic, but also the logistics for precincts to report their results. The names that precincts had been told to use when reporting their results did not match the names that headquarters had, and it led to even more confusion and human error.
Iowa’s party chair announced this morning that they plan to report the caucus results by 4pm.
The mood is “moribund,” the person said. “There is a sense that the Iowa caucuses are in serious jeopardy. That is a pretty universally held belief.”
We’ll be holding off on posts here until around 5pm ET when we expect to see results coming in.