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United States Politics

User-Error Problems With Iowa Caucus App Cause Online Confusion (nytimes.com) 349

Posted by msmash from the tech-failure dept.
Reports of Iowa precinct chairs struggling to use an app designed to help tally participation in the Democratic presidential caucuses on Monday fueled conspiracy theories on social media and raised questions about how smoothly the high-stakes nominating contest would unfold. From a report: Just hours before the beginning of the contest, the first of the 2020 elections, the headquarters of the Iowa Democratic Party received multiple calls from precinct chairs around the state reporting problems with the new app the party is using to calculate, tabulate and report results for the caucuses. The state party said nearly all of the calls were related to user-error problems, such as precincts in areas with bad cellphone service having problems downloading or logging into the app, or others simply asking about the app's functionality. Though the issues could possibly cause results to be delayed, the party said that it would not ultimately affect the reporting of results.

Sean Bagniewski, the Democratic Party chairman in Polk County, the most populous county in Iowa, said that only 20 percent of his 177 chairs could get into the app, but he added that there were "no malfunctions." "We're telling everyone to phone it in," Mr. Bagniewski said, referring to the hotline the party has used for decades to report results. Yet those issues appeared to trigger speculation on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms that the app had been hacked, or that it was malfunctioning in a way that would benefit a certain candidate. Further reading: Results from Iowa caucuses delayed because of 'quality control'.
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User-Error Problems With Iowa Caucus App Cause Online Confusion More

User-Error Problems With Iowa Caucus App Cause Online Confusion

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  • A certain candidate (Score:4, Funny)

    by lgw ( 121541 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @12:31AM (#59687846) Journal

    So what I'm reading in TFS is "this app didn't kill itself".

    • Re:A certain candidate (Score:4, Funny)

      by DaHat ( 247651 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @12:38AM (#59687862)

      That or modern smartphones are not capable of calculations involving the large number of Democrats in the race still.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by blindseer ( 891256 )

        That or modern smartphones are not capable of calculations involving the large number of Democrats in the race still.

        Also a consequence of Democrats having the habit of voting early, often, and even after they die.

        I guess this should not be a surprise that there are so many voters given that the average age of Democrat voters is "deceased", which just happens to be the average age of the people running for the nomination.

        • Troll much? A much larger proportion of democratic voters are young people. You know, the people who actually have to live with the desicions politicians make for a long time.

    • Re:A certain candidate (Score:4, Insightful)

      by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @11:18AM (#59689060)

      “Anybody who can go down 3000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well... Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!” -- Joe Biden

      Maybe Joe Biden will now learn to respect the skills of professional programmers now.

  • In related news ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @12:33AM (#59687850)

    ... John McAfee sweeps the Iowa caucuses.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hartree ( 191324 )

      John Draper was running a close second.

    • Indeed. Someone needs to!
      "... nearly all of the calls were related to user-error problems ..."
      In one or two places I might have bought that. But in so many places? I doubt it.

      "... bad cellphone service ..."
      In so many places across wide areas, and in the same time frame? With no news reports about Verizon or Comcast having satellite or other problems?

      Dead voters is a dead issue, though. Millions die (or move out of state) each year. All states have large numbers of dead or moved away voters st

  • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @12:37AM (#59687860)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Errors causing delays reporting...? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @02:21AM (#59687996)

        Currently it seems like the result is falling back on an old tabulation method that shaves delegates off the leaders by counting the unaligned people (basically the delegate results are fractions and in many cases this will result in the decimal rounding down to the next lowest integer instead of up) and casting doubt on the results in general (Biden was reporting doing very poorly, indicating he wasn't viable in many of the caucuses and his campaign has already indicated they intend to dispute).

      • When Bernie got screwed last time, he just bent over and took it. OF COURSE the DNC expects him to just take it again.

        What Bernie does is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what voters do. If Bernie supporters just vote for whatever Dem gets the nomination because Trump is the opponent then the DNC's tactics are successful and will be used again in the future. The only thing that can lead to party reform is denying a party a vote. Nothing else matters. Complain online, complain in person at rally, caucus, election, convention, etc ... it does *not* matter if they still get your vote. Your vote is your one and only

        • Re:What Bernie does is irrelevant ... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @03:15AM (#59688086) Homepage Journal

          If Bernie supporters just vote for whatever Dem gets the nomination because Trump is the opponent then the DNC's tactics are successful and will be used again in the future.

          And that, right there, is how our country got a President Trump in the first place. We'll see whether the powers that be in the Democratic Party learned their lesson or are going to keep playing their little games of thrones and run the party right into the ground.

          • Re:What Bernie does is irrelevant ... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @08:23AM (#59688584)

            The party is already in the ground, Bernie isn't the one that killed it, he's just the coroner. The DNC is corrupt and as much as they claim they want a democratic government, their own party can't even establish a fair procedure with the end-decision basically coming to super-delegates unless every Democrat can agree on a single candidate. So basically they promote many people running so a small set of 1%'ers can decide the vote for the rest of the party.

            And these people want to get rid of the electoral system and replace it with this, they can't even run their own elections.

          • >"or are going to keep playing their little games of thrones and run the party right into the ground."

            Based on what I have seen in the primaries to date, they already have.

            • "Third Way" being the name of politics where the Democrats move to the right and attack and cut social services.

              I can't find the clip, but Michael Moore said it best. We lost when we ran Hilary, Kerry, Mondale, you name it. Obama ran as a lefty and governed as a righty. Clinton was the only Centrist who ever won and he's the one that started "Third Way". And He just benefited from the .com boom and a weak challenger.

              When the Dems move right they lose because if I want to vote for a right wing candid

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
            Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • they stayed home because they were demoralized. In America it's _hard_ to vote. We vote in November, it's freaking _cold_ in the swing states and it's on a Tuesday night. There are often laws against voting outside your precinct and if you live in a left leaning neighborhood there aren't enough voting machines. Sometimes there aren't any at all and you've got to drive around town and wait for permission to vote because of those laws I mentioned.

            When I voted for Bernie in 2016 I waited in line 3 hours. T
        • There's some evidence that if Bernie doesn't get the nomination a lot of those votes just won't show up. A recent poll [reportablenews.com] had only around 50% of Bernie supporters indicating that they'd definitely support the Democratic nominee. 16% were definite "No's" for anyone else and the remaining 31% who said it depends could easily sour based on how all this plays out. Yang doesn't have the same number of voters as Bernie but his are even more of a "my candidate or bust" crowd.

          The only one you could write off from t

      • Re:Errors causing delays reporting...? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @02:49AM (#59688042) Journal
        I don't understand what Bloomberg is doing here. He jumped in way late, and his commercials are kind of creepy.

        • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @02:50AM (#59688044)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • When Obama was way out in front of the Republicans with a billion dollar war chest of donations, the Democrats also suddenly shut up about too much money in politics.

            In the First Amendmrnt, freedom of the press isn't so much the institutional press as literally the means of mass production and distribution of speech. Presses would be outlawed or controlled as a backdoor means of censorship.

            This is the core of the Supreme Court's unfairly mocked ruling that cash is speech -- it is used to buy advertising, t

        • > I don't understand what Bloomberg is doing here. He jumped in way late, and his commercials are kind of creepy.

          He's only in the race to siphon votes from the candidates the DNC doesn't want to win. Look up how much he donates to the PACs, he is the DNC establishment incarnate. The reason they add so many candidates is so that they can use the ones that have no hope to siphon votes from those they don't control.

          Spoiler alert: they don't want Bernie to win because they don't control him. The DNC prim

          • Funny that the DNC "establishment" candidate was a Republican mayor twenty years ago. Stranger still, Democrats have moved much further to the left in that 20 years, so Bloomberg has a lot of distance to cross.

          • "Don't worry, they can find other uses for their campaign funds after the party is over, too."

            We can only hope that money will be used to pay back the local businesses which keep getting stiffed.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by rho ( 6063 )

            they don't want Bernie to win because they don't control him

            Nonsense. If Sanders wins, in two years we'll be bombing Syria or some damn thing.

            Trump was elected on the platform of boxing up all foreigners and shipping them to the Space Force moon base, building a Great Wall of Mexico around Mexico (and possibly Canada), signing an executive order that only white babies named "Brett" or "Betty" get automatic citizenship, and to prosecute the Clintons until they are sentenced to hard labor in the MAGA hat sweatshops built with tax dollars in Kentucky.

            Instead we got a f

        • Re:Errors causing delays reporting...? (Score:5, Funny)

          by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @06:37AM (#59688416) Homepage

          Bloomberg/Hillary 2020.

          Then after the election is won, Bloomberg suddenly dies with no cameras present and Secret Service out for a sandwich, White House procedures on guests signing in and out mysteriously not followed. In the aftermath, all involved are either given promotions, meet with traffic accidents or epstein themselves.

        • I didn't get it either. They don't think Biden is viable. Biden keep making weird gaffs (google "Raprock MyBoss" and "CornPop" or that thing about his leg hairs). Biden's also pretty corrupt. Just regular politician corrupt, but it makes him highly vulnerable.

          Bloomberg is a hedge against Biden imploding. The plan is that if Biden blows it in the first 3 primaries Bloomberg steps in with his billions and buys the election. The only question is will we let that happen?

          I don't think so. Pretty much eve

      • Protip: DNC does not run Iowa caucuses. Bro.

      • I think you're right. When Bernie got screwed last time, he just bent over and took it. OF COURSE the DNC expects him to just take it again. They're cooking the books as we speak, either for Biden or Bloomberg's benefit.

        -jcr

        If that is the case let it be Bloomberg, he is the better out of two bad choices. Biden is going full senile old 'get off my lawn' shouting dotard on live television as we watch. Bloomberg on the other hand is at the very least a relatively moderate guy as business leaders go. He is also a real bonafide 100% documented billionaire who does not have a long chain of huge bankruptcies in his wake like a certain orange self professed business genius does. That is bound to piss the absolute hell out of Trump.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tsqr ( 808554 )

        Wait, I thought Bloomberg was passing on Iowa and New Hampshire to focus on Super Tuesday.

      • he just declared victory, and apparently he's friends with the CEO of the company that wrote the app. Yeah, the whole thing stinks to high heaven.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Hillary lost because Sanders is a poor loser and would never support her...that and she's somewhat of a ditz when it comes to politics.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      One story I read this morning is that Bernie got like 300 caucus for him, but because the other candidates also got to at least 20, they each got 1 vote causing Bernie Bro's to storm out in protest.

      I don't know if Democrats understand that their own process is rigged and that they only represent 50% of the (split) vote, the super-delegates get the other 50% of the vote and are basically the 1% agreeing on a candidate.

      Dems like to throw stones at representative government but they are themselves in a massive

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 )
      I'm still surprised the Democrats let Bernie run as one of them. The ONLY time he's become a Democrat is when he's wanted to run for President. Even after he lost in 2016, he went back to being an Independent.

  • If you are caught using your enterprise cert to distribute apps outside of your company Apple can revoke the certificate and your side loaded apps will not open. This happened to FB some months back?

    • If you are caught using your enterprise cert to distribute apps outside of your company Apple can revoke the certificate and your side loaded apps will not open. This happened to FB some months back?

      It was Android. One of the problems is that some users were mistaking the standard warning when side loading an APK for a malware warning. They thought they were getting hacked. As a result there were afraid to install it.

  • The vote should not be in the cloud or an app (Score:3)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @01:01AM (#59687884)

    The vote should not be in the cloud or an app.

    • The vote should not be in the cloud or an app.

      I can't understand why running elections seems to be so hard these days.

      Given Iowa's population of about 3 million people, there are unlikely to ever be more than 1 million voters in any election. I don't see why they need to use any technology that wasn't available in the 19th century. If they just set up a two-level calling tree with landline voice calls, no single person would have to sum up much more than a few hundred numbers, which they could easily do on some old adding machines. They could tally up

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        Re "What am I missing here?"
        The software to write the app... support for the app...
        vs paper and the ability to count.

      • You're assuming that accurate, reliable, safe, anonymous counting votes would be the primary design goals of any voting process. You will find evidence in every instance where the voting process was changed from pen and paper to any other method, that this basic bona-fide assumption does not hold true, in many cases it runs contrary to the actual implementations.

        That is only on top of the inherent mathematic or conceptual difficulties in any voting process, as the tendency of first-past-the-post systems to

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Paper starts looking great.

    • The vote should not be in the cloud or an app.

      Apparently it wasn't. :-)

    • Appers app, voters vote.

      Iowa doesn't.

  • Speaking of smartphone voting in West Virginia... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by imidan ( 559239 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @01:02AM (#59687888)

    So, the Iowa Democrats contracted with someone (from the news, it's not clear who) to write them a voting app for the caucuses. The voting app needed to work for about 2000 people for a few hours this evening. And it completely collapsed. Absolutely useless -- worse, even -- they're reverting to paper backups. These guys had one job. Who created this app? Did they test it? Did they train the users on it? Worthless goddamn swine. Who is going to be held responsible? Nobody. There are no consequences when people fail in these situations.

    This level of competence is why I don't think much of West Virginia's plan to enable voting on smartphone apps in actual elections. Tonight's debacle in Iowa may not be so bad compared to whatever happens in WV.

    • Re: Speaking of smartphone voting in West Virginia (Score:4, Interesting)

      by BytePusher ( 209961 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @01:14AM (#59687898) Homepage
      Apparently they are seeing record turnout and it seems like it's all for Bernie. They're "double checking" for typos if a district previously had 50 attendees and now has 500. In reality, Bernie won by a landslide and the DNC is trying to figure out how to collude with the media to say Iowa doesn't matter.

    • Apparently officials were not trained (Score:5, Interesting)

      by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @02:35AM (#59688030)

      Did they train the users on it?

      Apparently not, as some caucus officials were installing it for the first time tonight. They got the standard Android warning about side loading an APK and mistook this warning for a malware warning. They thought they were about to be hacked and did not install it.

      Also there was apparently no real security designed into this system as officials were supposed to use their personal phones for reporting election results.

    • You're assuming that a political organisation tells you the truth about problems within the same organisation. That's cute.

    • Re:Speaking of smartphone voting in West Virginia. (Score:5, Funny)

      by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @08:19AM (#59688580)

      Who created this app?

      Probably one of the overpaid programmers we hear tell us how great they are and how many years of experience they have.

      Did they test it?

      Of course they did. They tested it on the latest and greatest desktop with their 128 core processor and maxed out memory.

      Did they train the users on it?

      That wasn't necessary. The UI was so intuitive with its borderless screens and dull, flat fonts that anyone short of a rhesus monkey could use it. It's so easy to use there wasn't even a need for documentation.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      The app was written by Shadow Inc. Shadow Inc. doesn't list any developers or contact information, other than the fact they wrote 'apps' for various Democrat groups.

      When you look the people and donations up however, they are a group of Hillary campaigners that wrote this app pretty much overnight and donated big bucks to the DNC to get it in front of the states. This is going to repeat itself in every state until Hillary (or Biden) wins.

    • the app was created by a company called "Shadow" who's owner is a Pete Buttigieg supporter and (I shit you not) Buttigieg has ties to the CIA (look this up, again, I wish I was making this shit up) _and_ Buttigieg is declaring victory.

      I'm 90% sure this is what happened: App was meant to cheat Bernie but there were too many Bernie supporters with cell phones and training on election watching.

      Obama did something similar in 2008. He was sitting on a massive pile of cash going into the election and nobo

  • The real question is how many smartphones have been ruined by the user managing to punch their selection? Then there's the folding screens and "butterfly ballot" part 2.

    With a few notable exceptions, our would be leaders (on both sides) certainly can't be accused of technical competence.

  • Don't blame the users (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Leuf ( 918654 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @01:22AM (#59687910)
    When you can report zero results after two hours, when it usually takes half an hour to call the whole thing, it's not user error. That's clearly a systemic problem.

    • Re:Don't blame the users (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @01:43AM (#59687956) Homepage Journal

      If you expect someone to use a smartphone app in a place with no coverage, that's not a user error. That's a fail on the part of whoever was planning the system. If 5% of users can't get into your app, that's probably on them. If 80% can't, that's definitely on you.

    • Exactly my thought. "Precincts in areas with bad cellphone service having problems downloading or logging into the app" are not USER errors. They're environmental factors -- factors which have well-known tried and true ways of dealing with them, like caching and resubmitting with exponential backoff. They obviously just got some back-of-the-cheerios-box-taught developers to put it together and didn't hire enough people or have a large enough PBX to handle the call volume when the app DoS'd itself. This is a

    • It can be systemic and user error. I don't know if this explanation holds up this morning still, but last night they were saying there were two apps, with two different passwords. People were starting up the precinct totals report app and using the wrong password until they got locked out.

  • Wow. They can't do anything right. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hot soldering iron ( 800102 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @01:52AM (#59687968)

    One of the district secretaries (I think that's what they called them) called FOX commentators and told them that after the app "crashed" they reverted to the old "paper ballot and call it in" method. He? had been trying to do that, and they put him on hold. For over an hour. He still hadn't reported in by the time I got tired of watching the BS.

    I've seen a corrupt small town sheriff steal an election better than these incompetents. He at least had the deputy take the lockbox with the ballots to a back country road where they thought no one was looking to swap the votes, before turning it in to the county courthouse.

    I swear. The Dems can't steal an election, frame a President, or rig an impeachment for shit. Whenever I think of a traditionally Democrat controlled city, the first things I think of are crime riddled cesspools, run by corrupt incompetents. Many Republicans are actually Democrats running under a false flag, so don't think I just hate on Dems.

    I got a lot of hate to go around.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Bad cellphone coverage is a 'user error'.

  • Hacking? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Orlando ( 12257 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @03:56AM (#59688198) Homepage

    No, it's worse than that, it's incompetence.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      Have you heard the old gem, "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence." Yeah, so has every successful malicious actor. It makes for a convenient exit strategy if they get caught and need the benefit of the doubt.

  • This just in... (Score:4, Funny)

    by msauve ( 701917 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @06:45AM (#59688442)
    Iowa caucuses won by Little Bobby Tables [xkcd.com]!

  • I'm not going down the tin-foil hat rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.

    I'm just looking at the reasons given:

    • Bad cell phone service
    • Logging into the app
    • questions

    QUESTIONS are a user-error?

    This calls into question the competence of the Iowa Democratic party at a state wide level. As an organization. As a political party. Someone should take the existing leadership off to the side and tell them they should spend the next few summers running a lemonade stand.

    I can't even imagine how such a thorough

    • This. Definitely one for the history books. You can see the cell service collapsing in any place that had just adequate normal service because wherever their going to use the app, there will be a ton of people in close contact (unlike any test day) with their smartphones one, overwhelming local service. First out of the gates for the 2020 election and its a face-plant for the Democrats. The leadership that pushed for this smartphone thing should be gotten rid of, literally. Apparantly things went fine

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      I am amazed at how many technology oriented people are going down the conspiracy hole when the simple explanation of 'poorly tested software that was never run at this scale struggles at peak time when deployed' matches the data so well. They tried new tech in order to scale up a processes that historically depends on low turnout to work, and it couldn't keep up. Though I suspect the russian trolls are having a field day pumping the rumors.

  • Some say "bug", others say "feature"

  • Well...probably change the title to "DEMOCRATIC" Caucus because the GOP Iowa caucus went smoothly and Trump won 97% of the vote. Unless....it was the RUSSIANS (again)???

  • Meanwhile at Cacuses across Iowa... (Score:3)

    by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @11:13AM (#59689050)

    Pointing at the small group of Biden supporters - "You guys! You don't have enough bodies. Go dig up some more voters! The graveyard is that way and you will find shovels in the corner. Hurry, folks are waiting!"

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