<story><title>Iowa Caucuses, the Blob, and the Democratic Party Cartel</title><url>https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/iowa-caucuses-the-blob-and-the-democratic</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CWuestefeld</author><text>&lt;i&gt;The root cause of the Iowa fiasco is a nonprofit corporation called ACRONYM, which owns the technology company Shadow, Inc.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not at all clear to me that this is the case. I mean, sure, there are obviously big problems with the app&amp;#x27;s design and implementation. But there are ample signs of deeper problems with the customer (and indeed, TFA alludes to some of it).&lt;p&gt;The fact that the Party insisted on keeping specifics about the app secret until the last minute was the first big red flag to me. With the customer making such a demand about a product that&amp;#x27;s intended to be widely distributed with zero ramp-up time, they had at least two strikes against them from the start.&lt;p&gt;Further mess-ups outside the app development, like using the same phone lines for support and for reporting, are mistakes that don&amp;#x27;t obviously fall on the shoulders of the developer.&lt;p&gt;The customer - the Iowa Democratic Party - probably needs to bear at least part of the blame for this. It&amp;#x27;s true that an experienced developer might have given their customer better guidance, but that doesn&amp;#x27;t absolve the Party from these mistakes.</text></comment>
<story><title>Iowa Caucuses, the Blob, and the Democratic Party Cartel</title><url>https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/iowa-caucuses-the-blob-and-the-democratic</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zaroth</author><text>There’s an extremely interesting and important discussion to be had around what happened with an App in Iowa, but TFA seems like the wrong plank to walk off of to have it.&lt;p&gt;Maybe one day we will have an honest and true post mortem of what happened on Monday. Reports have been conflicting and non-sensical. No one that I can find has managed to actually show the app in question in detail, what numbers were meant to be reported, and how it actually all fell apart.&lt;p&gt;I’ve heard explanations ranging from caucus chairs unable to login to the app, to the result reports coming out of the app being corrupted. Days later we’re still at only 70% precincts reporting and a race still too close to call. For what was apparently, a fairly low turnout event.&lt;p&gt;We’re talking about a web form collecting like 6 integer values from 1,765 precincts, right?</text></comment>