What’s the matter with Iowa? What we know about the app some called a ‘failure’
Technical problems marred reporting from Iowa’s presidential caucuses Monday night, leaving the state Democratic Party without results overnight and into Tuesday morning, according to multiple reports.
Iowa was the first in the nation test of the Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination, but the state party said it found “inconsistencies” in the results. NPR reported local committee chairs blamed problems with a new smartphone app that was supposed to report the results.
Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price told reporters overnight that the party is “manually verifying all precinct results,” NBC News reports. He said he expected to report results sometime Tuesday.
The party, he said, is “validating every piece of data we have against our paper trail. That system is taking longer than expected, but it’s in place to ensure we are eventually able to report results with full confidence,” according to NBC News.
The party said there was no “hack or intrusion” into the app, NPR said.
The backup for the app was for caucus officials to call in results to a hotline, but that was overrun with callers from around the state all trying to report results and bogged down with long waits, according to multiple reports.
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign general counsel, Dana Remus, called the state’s reporting system a “failure” in a letter to the Iowa Democratic Party, The New York Times reports.
“These acute failures are occurring statewide,” she said, according to The Times. Remus said both the app and the telephone reporting system had failed in the letter to the state party chair.
Just before midnight, NPR shared a clip from an interview with the co-chair of the Des Moines County Democratic Party Tom Courtney.
He told NPR, “The app didn’t work. Things didn’t work out right. I’ve been trying to call for several hours to report my results and I can’t get though on the phone.”
Polk County Democratic Chair Sean Bagniewski told CNN that some precinct chairs told him they’d been on hold for up to two hours. “There’s no way to report them. We’ve got them,” he said, according to CNN.
At 1:27 a.m. Tuesday, Bagniewski shared photos of stacks of boxes with the Polk County results.
He tweeted, “We’re still not sure what’s going on with the app and phone lines for state reporting, but rest assured, that all of the Polk County results have been turned in and are secure. Our thousands of volunteers did absolutely amazing work tonight.”
This story was originally published February 4, 2020 at 8:56 AM.
