We begin today’s roundup with Eric Levitz at New York Magazine and his take on the chaos of yesterday’s Iowa caucuses:
The “first-in-the-nation” Iowa caucuses died Monday night after a protracted battle with advanced-stage omnishambles.
Or so we can hope. Iowa’s eccentric, endearing — and wildly anti-democratic — nominating contest has always been an indefensible institution. There is no reason why the most politically-engaged and/or time-rich citizens of America’s 31st most populous state should have the power to veto presidential candidates before anyone else in the country has a say. And yet, few of Iowa’s bitterest critics ever dreamed it would subject the country to something like this.
Eric Lach at The New Yorker has a snapshot of the confusion at one caucus precinct:
The caucus was over, but the drama wasn’t. All around the state, precincts were having trouble reporting their results to the Iowa Democratic Party. Pleasantville was no exception. The app that had been built for precincts to convey that their results wasn’t working. “Everyone was having trouble with the app, and then everybody had to call in, and then the phones went down,” Russell said. He spent sixty-seven minutes and forty-seven seconds on hold with the state Party, only to be told to text in a photograph of the precinct’s results. Hours after the caucus ended, things still weren’t sorted. No one knew more than what they saw in front of them, or in bits and pieces on Twitter. The campaigns were racing to respond and put the best spin on things. Buttigieg did well in Pleasantville, but how did he do in Spencer, or Fort Dodge? “Pretty much a big mess,” Russell said. “I’m really concerned that we’re putting our first-in-the-nation status in jeopardy.” Earlier in the night, he’d settled a Presidential contest by a coin flip, but things were looking even weirder now.
The Atlantic’s Russell Berman dives deeper into the app that caused the chaos and controversy:
As my colleague Elaine Godfrey reported yesterday, some Iowa Democrats were worried that new rules for counting and reporting results from individual caucus sites would lead to confusion and chaos. The caucus itself appeared to run smoothly enough; the trouble stemmed instead from problems with the new application that precinct chairs were asked to use for reporting the numbers. The app was intended to help caucus organizers tally results, apportion delegates, and send in final counts to the Iowa Democratic Party. Earlier in the day, Bloomberg reported that several caucus leaders across the state were unable to use the new app, and would have to send in their results via a party hotline.
But the backup phone system appeared to be overwhelmed as well. “The hotline has not been responsive,” Shawn Sebastian, a precinct secretary, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer at about 11 p.m. yesterday, explaining that he had been on hold for more than an hour. While Sebastian was live on the air, he was taken off hold. But by the time he tried to report his results, the operator had hung up.
And while conspiracy theories raged, many people were pointing out that incompetence not nefarious actions likely led to all this:
On a final note, the Governor of Illinois made a pitch on Twitter: