What Is the Extent of Mayor Pete’s Involvement With the App That Crashed the Iowa Caucuses?

It's not what some Bernie Sanders supporters would have you believe.

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Conspiracy theories thrive in environments rife with motivated reasoning and mass confusion. The chaos of the Iowa caucuses earlier this week provided both in spades.

In the hours after the first votes of the 2020 presidential election cycle were cast, the Iowa Democratic Party proved unable to report the results. Only 62 percent of the vote was released the following day, with the remaining precincts reporting their final tallies at a slow drip throughout the week. By the time 100 percent of the results were finally published on Thursday, the process had been marred by not only justifiable accusations of incompetence and serious allegations of errors and inconsistencies, but conspiracy theories that lacked supporting evidence.

Central to the dysfunction in the Hawkeye State was a mysterious app—fittingly called Shadow—backed by Acronym, a self-described “nonprofit organization committed to building power and digital infrastructure for the progressive movement.” Emily Stewart put together an excellent explainer on the pair’s relationship over at Recode.

In a press conference on Tuesday addressing what went wrong the night before, Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price blamed the app for the delays. “This was a coding error in one of the pieces on the back-end,” he said.

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  1. Avatar photo
    John D. Wright

    Good post. I agree that affecting the result is nigh impossible. I do wonder about controlling the news but realize this company is likely out of business. What company no matter how loyal to a candidate will put itself out of business just to delay the release of good or bad news? I think this is much ado about nothing but that is Bernies way.

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    Bennet

    Correct me if I am wrong, but the Sanders campaign is responsible for the need to collect/release extra data this year (i.e. votes before viability/realignment and each ballot before the final)? Because, he felt the party (of which he is not a member) was biased against him toward Hillary (a life long member). This contributed to the chaos. I know in this age irony is dead, but the Bernie camp might chew on it a little bit...

    Trying to use a digital app for an analog process was stupid to begin with, but isn't allowing people from outside your private organization to dictate the rules of your organization also pretty stupid? Here's to the end of the Iowa caucuses, cheers?!

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  3. Avatar photo
    Butch Earl

    “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” ~ Carl Sagan*
    This is as good a place as any to explain how I became a devoted skeptic. In the mid-1970s, I watched a PBS Nova documentary on the Bermuda Triangle. I was expecting the usual discussion of time/space warps, power sources from the lost continent of Atlantis, and interference by extra-terrestrials from the planet Gumby in the Andromeda Galaxy. Instead, what I saw was a presentation of facts and illustrations of the dangers of simply repeating a previous author’s claims without checking those facts.
    One of the works most quoted in the documentary was, “The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved” by Lawrence Kusche. If highly recommend Larry Kusche’s book and his companion work, “The Disappearance of Flight 19” if you can find them. In the PBS Documentary, Kusche says, “Some people drink from the fountain of knowledge; others only gargle. I’m afraid we’re becoming a world of garglers who want to pretend we’re thinking deeply when we really aren’t.”
    To make a long story short, let’s use the Flight 19 story. The popular tale is on December 5, 1945, a flight of five Grumman Avengers took off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida on a nice sunny day and simply vanished without a trace. In actual fact, a flight of 4 student pilots and a disoriented instructor who was not familiar area took off, got lost, and ran out of gas over the Atlantic on a long dark night in a winter storm with very rough seas. Among the evidence ignored by the popular authors is the testimony of two naval officers who were in the tower at the time. Interviewed for the documentary, the men both stated they did not expect to find any survivors as the sea was far too high and rough and the possibility of a successful ditching was extremely low.
    Since then, I’ve always followed Sagan’s advice and expect those making extraordinary claims to provide the evidence for those claims. It’s up to the Democrats to prove the Russians rigged the election for Trump; it’s up to Trump to prove his Ukraine call was “perfect”; and it’s up to the Sandersistas to prove Bernie’s opposition is conspiring to rig elections against him.
    *Note: In the unlikely event this is read by any committed Trump tribalists, yes, I’m well aware Carl Sagan was a head-to-toe, butt-to-navel socialist and I am most certainly not. Don’t worry, he did not live long enough to vote against Trump.

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  4. Avatar photo
    Earl King

    There is but one lie that is going around about Mayor Pete. He is a centrist. He is not. He is almost as Progressive as Bernie and Elizabeth.

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    Freda Salatino

    The Sanders people were sorely disappointed in 2016, so it's no surprise that they're gun-shy now. Thank you for reporting this story in an even-handed, non-hysterical fashion.

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