In years past, the beginning of February may have been a time to look forward to the Super Bowl, or even the State of the Union with other presidents. This year, it was all about the Iowa caucus.
After more than a year of anticipation, we were finally going to get some information about what all of that polling, financial news and stump speech rhetoric added up to on the ground. We were going to take our first steps in selecting a nominee to take on Donald Trump.
But Monday’s event quickly turned into a fiasco, with very little data reported at the outset, and the bulk of data vexingly withheld from public view. It wasn’t until Tuesday afternoon, nearly 24 hours later, that the results started coming in — and they were partial results, at that. Those results showed that former Mayor Pete Buttigieg had a narrow lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders, followed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The results and the chaos surrounding the caucus limits the impact of Iowa, especially given that it did little to provide a clear winner or direction for the party.
The disaster we witnessed this week should be Iowa’s final first-in-the-nation caucus event. Even before Monday’s debacle, many voices in the party were rightly calling attention to the fact that Iowa’s overwhelmingly white population does a poor job of representing the diverse Democratic Party.
Caucuses, meanwhile, an evil cousin of ranked-choice voting, have long been identified as a voting technique that depresses turnout and shuts out large chunks of the population, including those with small children, the elderly and disabled, and those who don’t speak English fluently.
There is no way the party should ever again allow a caucus to lead off its nominating contest.
We hope Monday’s mess also spells the end of a misplaced trust in ever newer technologies to safeguard our elections. Part of the problem appears to be that a poorly tested, unvetted phone app was introduced to aid in reporting and tallying — and then utterly failed. Adequate training on the technology was reportedly nonexistent, and people of all ages seemed to have had trouble understanding how to use it.
At the same time, the Iowa Democratic Party has not up to now adequately demonstrated why it needed to hold back the election results officials claimed were reported. They said late into Monday night that about 35% of precincts had reported data, but released results for only about 2% of the precincts.
If we are to have open and fair elections, we need our election results reported — or some good reasons why they are not. In the interim, unhelpful conspiracy theories abound, and what started as technical difficulties is blowing up into something larger with far scarier implications for the task of taking on Trump. It is the job now of the investigative teams of local and national news organizations to find out exactly what happened and see what semblance of trust in the process can be explained or restored.
The remaining Democratic contests would be well advised to check and recheck their systems and scrap any unnecessary or shaky technology they might be depending on. Here’s hoping that the New Hampshire primary next Tuesday produces more tangible outcomes.