This means nothing. People who do tech around Democratic politics are not vast in number. It does not surprise me at all that some guy who has connections in Democratic politics was able to cut a contract with the Iowa Democratic Party (not the DNC!) because he knew some people, and then wrote a crappy app (or had Raji and his crew in Bangalore do it for pennies on the dollar) that wasn’t properly tested and failed on its first big use, which is totally common when rolling out tech (anyone remember the rollout of the ACA exchanges?)
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Nothing significant that I’m aware of.
Australian electoral procedures were instituted at a time when the country had a very strong and militant union movement, with recent experience of deadly serious labour struggles. They were fully aware of the potential for ruling class fuckery, and guarded against it. Hence the compulsory voting attendance etc.
Which isn’t to say that electoral fuckery doesn’t go on down here. But it’s generally achieved by media manipulation rather than vote tampering. In the last election, the right wing were putting out partisan posters in Chinese that were disguised to look like non-partisan informational AEC materials.
Plus, of course, the complete exclusion of Indigenous Australians from citizenship until 1967. No need to suppress the vote when you just don’t allow people to vote in the first place.
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The part I cannot understand is supporters who claim they want a particular candidate to be their leader. That support vanishes when their chosen leader encourages them to do something that doesn’t meet with their approval. So they are not likely to cast their vote for someone their leader chooses to endorse.
Compare that with people who support the current administration. They are mocked for following and acting on whatever their leader tells them - even if he lies daily and frequently contradicts himself. Fair-weather fans of a candidate don’t really follow anyone. I wonder if pollsters and strategists would be better off considering them Undecided.
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Luckily, I no longer drink sodas near my keyboard. Nice try.
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Not original to me by a long shot. But it does sum up the type quite well.
Iowa represents some 1% of the delegates so I’ll say, no?
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Yeah, there’s definitely a portion of Bernie’s base that’s…err…disquieting 
.
Frankly, I’ve always liked Bernie in spite of his supporters, not often with. I’m not keen, however, on voting in a 78-year-old who already had a heart attack on the campaign trail, that simple, and that’s a serious problem for loits of folks in a national campaign. Absolutely, anyone but Darth Chee-To, but I think it’s a big mistake for him to stay in the race.
Don’t panic. There’s no conspiracy, because there was no fraud or illegitimate votes.
The votes were safely written on paper with pens as they ought to be.
This shitty app had nothing to do with the actual voting, as it was used only by precinct captains to report results to DNC HQ. No votes were lost; only the reporting was corrupted and delayed.
Please try to avoid spreading misinformation about the voting process being untrustworthy. This was not such an issue. There’s already enough mistrust, and fearmongering won’t help us hold a valid election that the country trusts.
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THANK YOU. The amount of ridiculous conspiracy theorizing, from what I can tell 100% coming from Sanders supporters, is insane. Which is particularly odd, given the results as reported so far, that are very good for Bernie, and horrible for Biden, who by all accounts many in the DNC would like to have seen do very, very well in Iowa.
I say this btw as someone who is fine with Bernie Sanders, gave him a LOT of money in 2016, and would be thrilled to see him win in November in the general (although he’s number 2 for me, with Warren my top choice).
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So now the LA times are Russian operatives, too? Time to quit blaming Russia for our own failings:
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Anyone who has any experience at all with software development knows that there’s no way you can be sure that your code doesn’t have bugs.*
Anyone who cares about the integrity of the election would not think it was a good idea to take the risk of getting it wrong.
*Unless you implement it as a hardware gate array with a truth table enumerating every possible state of the system.
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Which is why, if it absolutely has to work right the first time, and every time, software developed with modern practices is not the right tool for the job.
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I would consider this a good thing. Zealotry has never been good for humans.
I, have always voted but never for “a leader”. I think of them more akin to top administrative clerk than anyone I look to for guidance in anything.
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What is this? The DNC’s head of cyber-security recommended against use of this app to the Iowa Democratic Party?
Well, this surely means that the conspiracy runs even deeper than we could have imagined! Clearly he was using reverse psychology, in an attempt to encourage the use of the app, which the DNC had control over, and caused to crash on the night of the cauc—
Sad thing is, I’m sure some folks will be saying just this, come tomorrow.
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The conspiracy at hand is the sweetheart contract for this crapware. It was a handout to long-time party cronies,from what I see, and it was incredibly stupid and venal.
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i thought so too, only multiple places have put the price tag at 60,000 for iowa and 70,000 for nevada. that’s peanuts
i suspect the software wasn’t even ready to be able to be tested
there’s reports they only delivered the app a few days ago. and that they were using development builds ( which required custom permissions. ) even the screenshots about problems with unknown custom url schemes makes it sound like they were probably relying on development libraries or extensions not available on most consumer phones.
i feel like if people are looking to blame some single programmer… that’s just not how development normally works.
60k would barely be enough for one person ( let alone their overhead: lights, office space, healthcare ) not to mention a product manager, customer liason, qa team, beta testing, and the money for server hardware and licenses.
i imagine some one person getting stuck with a $#@+ show, being told to “make it work”, hired by a company which has no idea what they are doing.
[edit] for all anyone knows the programmer(s) could have been shouting all along how it wasn’t going to work. i’ve personally seen that more than once. but it’s unlikely we’ll ever hear their story since that’s generally under nda.
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Every time I’ve voted here in Detroit, they’ve had paper ballots, and a reader like you describe. Our readers have always printed receipts, though.
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I want to see a sexy answer for it but I guess that’s out of date
