Everyone is really sorry about what happened in Iowa. But nobody will take the blame.
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In Iowa, the buck stops with no one. |
We are now into the fourth day of what I’ve taken to calling the Great Caucus Catastrophe of 2020. There are still no definitive results. And so far, no one seems willing to take responsibility for the meltdown. |
Sure, there have been apologies. Regrets, they have a few. But no one has uttered three simple words: It’s my fault. |
The Democratic National Committee blames the Iowa Democratic Party. Today, Tom Perez, the D.N.C. chairman, called for a recanvass, a process the state party says it will undertake if specifically requested by a campaign. |
The state party, meanwhile, blames an app created by a Democratic tech firm to report the results. |
The coders say the problem was not with the app but their ability to transmit the results. They “sincerely regret the delay” and promise to “apply the lessons learned in the future.” |
Yet, the app is only one problem of many. Party officials bowed to pressure from Senator Bernie Sanders and his team to release three sets of results rather than just the traditional delegate count — yet they didn’t design a system that could handle the additional work of twice collecting the total vote count. |
They withheld the technical details of the app, making it hard for outsiders to vet it for security concerns and usability. And clearly the training was insufficient, considering that some of the precinct captains couldn’t even download it. |
Precinct captains who called a phone hotline to report results waited for hours on hold, with some repeatedly getting hung up on during caucus night. |
As we reported yesterday, the party set up 85 phone lines to handle calls from more than 1,600 caucus sites. Troy Price, the chair of the state party, blamed supporters of President Trump for flooding the line. |
“State parties don’t have the capacity to run a 21st century election,” said David Pepper, chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. “I’m sure everyone worked hard, but it’s just not a good idea.” |
Even the results that Iowa Democrats have released are “riddled with inconsistencies and other flaws,” according to a New York Times investigation. |
“More than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, that were missing data or that were not possible under the complex rules of the Iowa caucuses,” according to the analysis posted by our Upshot colleagues today. |
Mr. Price has offered an apology and promised a full independent investigation. But he has given no real explanation for what went wrong. |
Candidates are getting fed up with the uncertainty. |
“That screw-up has been extremely unfair to the people of Iowa, it has been unfair to the candidates, all of the candidates, and all of their supporters,” Mr. Sanders said at a news conference today. |
He’s right: The delay had a real impact on the dynamics of the race. The importance of Iowa stems from the momentum it can lend a candidate. Both Pete Buttigieg and Mr. Sanders, the two top finishers, lost some of theirs in the morass of mismanagement. |
But the fallout will last far past 2020. Already, officials in Illinois, Michigan and other states have barely suppressed their glee at the idea of jumping to the front of the primary calendar. How Iowa Democrats handle the next steps will affect their already-diminishing chances of keeping their first-in-the-nation voting status. |
Even if the caucuses go the way of the dodo, problems with technology and elections are only likely to multiply. |
Election watchers see the caucus meltdown as a giant warning sign about the dangers to come as new technologies complicate voting, making it easier for bad actors to tamper with the most basic building blocks of our democracy. |
Without a full accounting for what went wrong, a process that includes taking responsibility, it’s hard to identify those weaknesses — never mind figuring out how to avoid them in the future. |
So, Iowa, I’ll be waiting by the phone for your explanations. Probably on hold. |
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What would a ‘recanvass’ look like? |
 | | Mark Makela for The New York Times |
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When Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, demanded that Iowa Democrats double-check votes from Monday’s caucuses, he mentioned a “recanvass.” There is also the possibility of a “recount.” |
What’s the difference? In short: A recanvass involves checking the math on 1,756 precinct work sheets. A recount would require the hand-counting of about 180,000 preference cards from caucusgoers across the state and around the world. |
Here’s how we got to this point, and what would most likely happen if a recanvass or recount occurs. |
What happened on caucus night? |
On Monday night, each precinct’s volunteer leaders filled out a work sheet that recorded the total attendees, the number who supported given candidates and a mathematical calculation of the state delegates that each candidate had earned. Caucus organizers also collected “presidential preference cards” on which caucusgoers wrote a first, and if necessary, a second choice. |
The results that the state party has reported so far are based on the work sheets, Troy Price, the Iowa Democratic Party chairman, told members of his central committee on a conference call on Wednesday night. Packets of the preference cards, meant as a backup, have been collected from nearly every precinct and are stored “in a secure location,” he said. |
On Thursday, Mr. Price issued a statement saying that the state party would comply with any candidate’s request for a recanvass that was “in compliance with the Iowa Delegate Selection Plan.” |
Under a recanvass, the precinct work sheets would undergo a “hand audit” to “ensure that they were tallied and reported in the telephone intake sheets and caucus reporting application correctly,” according to the party. |
Under a recount — a closer level of scrutiny — party officials would conduct a “hand count and audit of Presidential Preference Cards to ensure that caucus votes were tallied and reported correctly in the caucus work sheets and reporting forms,” the party explains. |
Is this likely to change the results? |
A recount based on the cards, if it comes to that, might not be definitive in a razor-close race, as now exists between Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg. This is the first caucus in which cards were used, intended to act as a paper trail after criticism that the caucuses lacked transparency. |
Caucusgoers wrote their first choice on one side of the card, and if that candidate did not reach a threshold of support and was knocked out, the caucusgoer could flip the card over and write in a second choice. The cards were supposed to be turned in to the caucus administrators. |
But in interviews this week, a number of caucus chairs said that there were undercounts in the cards they submitted to the state party, because not everyone turned in a card. |
“We collected 186 cards; four people left without turning in a card,” said Pat Loeffler, who helped run a caucus in Linn County. His precinct, Cedar Rapids 39, reported 190 votes on the work sheet submitted to the party. Mr. Loeffler’s job was to stand at the door. “I was basically asking if they turned in their card or not,” he said, adding that it had been easy for people in a hurry to dart past him. |
What, The New York Times’s banner headline — “SPLIT SENATE CLEARS TRUMP ON EACH COUNT IN FINALE OF A BITTER IMPEACHMENT BATTLE” — wasn’t catchy enough? |
 | | Evan Vucci/Associated Press |
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