The root cause of the Iowa fiasco is a nonprofit corporation called ACRONYM, which owns the technology company Shadow, Inc.
It's not at all clear to me that this is the case. I mean, sure, there are obviously big problems with the app's design and implementation. But there are ample signs of deeper problems with the customer (and indeed, TFA alludes to some of it).
The fact that the Party insisted on keeping specifics about the app secret until the last minute was the first big red flag to me. With the customer making such a demand about a product that's intended to be widely distributed with zero ramp-up time, they had at least two strikes against them from the start.
Further mess-ups outside the app development, like using the same phone lines for support and for reporting, are mistakes that don't obviously fall on the shoulders of the developer.
The customer - the Iowa Democratic Party - probably needs to bear at least part of the blame for this. It's true that an experienced developer might have given their customer better guidance, but that doesn't absolve the Party from these mistakes.
The whole thing is a red flag. McGowan's ties to the Buttigieg campaign[0] are a clear conflict of interest. Whether or not there was malicious intent, there was no disclosure ahead of time. Now we get the conspiracy theories.
And I can't really blame people for theorizing conspiracy. The IDP and DNC should've vetted this company in advance and declined due to the conflict of interest.
Let's not forget that they were told not to go ahead with using this app (albeit for other reasons than the ties to the Buttigieg campaign)[1].
They do have influence. For example, the Iowa caucus process from the messy 2016 results were hashed out with the DNC involved.
That mainly focused on increasing transparency. Thanks to the activists, we got transparency on initial and final vote count before SDE%. Activists in 2016 pushed for financial transparency but that didn't pass.
And here we are.... with a firm called Shadow that borked an otherwise very well run caucus process.
The app is an excuse/trojan horse. They could have counted and reconfirmed it all by Tuesday with a strong phone bank, paper records alone.
I don't know anyone with firsthand direct knowledge of the Iowa Caucuses who believes that, and am reading lots of people with that knowledge pushing back on that as misinformation. Obviously, I'm not going to use the name "Shadow" as evidence one way or the other in a message board argument, because that argument is silly.
Not the parent, but I believe the Unity Reform Commission, which had reps appointed by Clinton, Sanders, and Perez (head of DNC) is what influenced the 2020 caucus. So while it's not inaccurate to say it was the DNC, that's not quite the whole picture.
Hey, not everyone is thwarted by the dreaded front page. I generally look about 3 to 5 pages in because some of the more interesting discussions tend to end up getting flagged in one way or another.
> The customer - the Iowa Democratic Party - probably needs to bear at least part of the blame for this.
They bear most of the fault.
The event they run is an every-4-year organizational nightmare run almost entirely by volunteers. It is akin to running a bunch of small conferences in synchrony, which is not something people really normally do.
It is entirely possible to get it right - it isn't super difficult, just a lot of work. But changing the rules, inserting the (bad) app, changing the phone numbers involved in the backup plan shortly beforehand... this process was doomed before they started.
I'm not defending the app - I really really don't think they should be heading down this path - but the app failure was as much shoddy planning and training was it was about the app.
(And I do hope this kills the caucus - far past time for it to go.)
It’s really jarring that the orgs are called ACRONYM and Shadow. I thought those were just ironic filler names to mock the real, undisclosed orgs. But from the article and tweets, it seems real.
Still feels like a parody of some sort. Let me know if I’m not getting it.
In politics, there's a huge incentive for insiders to appear to be a kingmaker. Names like Shadow and ACRONYM play into that stereotype of a behind the scenes puppet master, that politicians will pay big dollars to get them / keep them in power.
At a larger level, it makes understanding whats happening really difficult. Its hard to tell who is actually corrupt and who is "peacocking" corruption.
Not a coincidence, an inevitability. Bill and Hillary Clinton have been in politics for many years, Bill Clinton was President for 8 years and Hillary ran for President twice. Anyone who is anyone in the Democratic party would want to work for them at some point.
That’s a fair point. Although... when you think about the idea of peacocking that you are a kingmaker, it just flat out reminds me of the hubris that lost Clinton 2016 and that her staffers had to bear some of the blame.
Now here we are years later and there are “app voting irregularities” from the people that swore up and down Russia was hacking our elections, you think those people would be more cautious if they actually believed those claims themselves.
Thinking about it some more, I guess this is probably a “attribute to incompetence, not malice” situation, but as amusing as I found it, really was just made for the conspiracy theorist!
Go to any political environment, everyone tries to swagger like they are the best connected in the room. Hell, go to any convention anywhere and see the same thing.
State Democratic parties are cheap and obstinate. Most of the money is siphoned off by salaries and contractors. They don't work together nor work with the national party. When the deign to do so it is because their offered a lot of funding or favors.
No, I had the same exact thought. They are basically Bond villain org names. I don't think there was some grand conspiracy here, far more likely a grand failure of tech as a fix for perceived organizational problems as seen in any number of corporations.
> It’s really jarring that the orgs are called ACRONYM and Shadow... Still feels like a parody of some sort.
I thought it was satire the first time I heard as well. Voting software from a company called Shadow inc. is just such bad optics. Nobody there thought to at least spin off a company called "Open Digital Democracy Services Inc.", open source the thing and maybe get some external entity to take a look at it?
This reminds me a bit about putting funny messages in logs which are emitted during catastrophic events. It might seem cute at the moment, but when shit hits the fan and the customer calls and quotes those lines back at you over the phone it is just so embarrassing.
Fails the acronym test. ODDS or ODDSInc (pronounced like odd-sink).
Still much better than Shadow though. I'd probably have just gone with something like "Crier", "Political Systems Awareness", or even "Total Internal Communications and iNfrastructure Services.
Crier is harmless because all you're doing is shouting the results from the rooftops to anyone who'll listen.
Everybody can respect a metrics communication implemented by that PSA company.
A little contrived and maybe a bit dated imagery-wise, but an IT company that's whose name degenerates to TIN-CANS (with a string in the middle of course) is refreshingly on the nose, and most importantly, way more appropriate than Shadow.
Naming is an art best approached with at least some level of care. Not trying to legitimize most marketing-wank, but you do prime the discourse through your decision with regards to what you call yourself.
Maybe the founders are fans of fictional depictions of evil megacorporations such as Evil Corp, Massive Dynamic Inc, Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated, etc.
I’m not sure we can even distinguish the entities involved in this case. The head of the Iowa Democratic Party was partying with the ACRONYM’s CEO just before the election. She is married to a Buttigeig staffer. Her husband’s brother is comms director for Buttigeig and was tweeting out log in PINs during the election. And of course the whole ACRONYM operation is wrapped up with Democratic Party dark money.
I would say that companies who have ties to competing campaigns shouldn't be allowed to also provide services to the IDP or DNC.
I'd even go further and say that no campaign staffer should be tied to any companies providing services to the campaign.
Edit: clarified - obviously campaigns consult companies for their success, but they shouldn't provide services to both the DNC and the campaign.
Edit2: the IDP runs the caucus
That's a huge restriction to put in place with no indication that anything has ever happened like that. The incentives are aligned for both the company to refuse and the campaign to never ask because both would black ball them forever from politics...
I don't think the fact that it hasn't happened yet is a good enough argument.
>The incentives are aligned for both the company to refuse and the campaign to never ask because both would black ball them forever from politics...
Oh no... it shouldn't be voluntary, it should be required. If a company is providing services to a campaign, that same company should not have any role on the election side.
The app was a reporting convenience more than anything. There was an entire paper trail and a manual process to go along with it. It wasn't core to the accurate count at all.
Not entirely they're also trying to report far more information out this year than last. Previously there was only the State Delegate Equivalent count recorded and reported and there was no paper trail of the counts at each stage. This year they're tracking the first and second alignments along with the final SDE count.
All of those papers have to be hand recounted because they're not setup to be machine counted.
This isn’t true. The Sanders campaign never gave anything to Shadow or ACRONYM. From the reporting I’ve seen, Buttigeig was the largest purchaser of their services, with Biden as a distant second.
I mean, who knows, you have to be a lot more sophisticated to grok the FEC db, for example here's over a half million to AmEx from the Bernie camp, for what?
There's just so many payments and transfers to/from Senate and Presidential campaign and big donors that just go opaque as without knowing what the recipient really did with that money for every candidate that takes donations, this is a very hard problem to answer without a serious investigation by a team of journalists and lawyers.
So your argument is that there are somewhere secret payments from the Sanders campaign to ACRONYM, a related entity of PACRONYM, an anti-Sanders dark money group and their “tech” company, Shadow?
My comment was in response to someone claiming that all the campaigns in Iowa had funded both groups. There is no evidence of that.
I was on the conspiracy bandwagon until I looked a little more at Shadow Inc. The company also sells a voter database connector called Lightrail: https://shadowinc.io/lightrail as well as a voter SMS spamming platform: https://shadowinc.io/messaging
The FEC line items (e.g. for Gillibrand, Biden, Buttigieg) said the money was for software licensing and consulting, so that's probably it.
Yes but the other connections are there. McGowan's husband works for Buttigieg's campaign. It's a conflict of interest. The party should have rules in place for this: either provide services to the campaigns or provide services to the party, not both.
Not sure how much Gillibrand spent, but iirc Biden only spent $1250.
Eventually one of these campaigns will become the overriding majority of the DNC when they win the nomination. It’s how it works in the bylaws of the both parties. The President is the leader of which ever party elected him/her into power until a replacement is made.
Iowa goes first. It sets the tone of the entire primary. It sucks, it's ridiculous, it's antidemocratic, but it's the reality on the ground, it's an important part of any serious Democrat primary campaign since Carter won it in '76. Without making any claim about the intent of the DNC and the malice/incompetence axis, ~IF~ someone was going to ratfuck a candidate out of a primary victory, Iowa would be an important component.
Pete being able to claim he won is a huge boost for his campaign.
If 100% of the votes come in and the truth is that Bernie won, then there is a very strong case that the DNC cherry-picked results to screw Bernie and take momentum away from his campaign.
Please refrain from baseless speculation about fudged results. Sanders own campaign tabulated numbers basically match the Iowa results so far and there's little reason to believe that the remaining numbers aren't going to largely match the existing result pools.
That's pretty close and note those are going to be predominantly from places where Sanders has the most organized physical presence because they're the first ones into his campaign model.
There are commenters here with firsthand knowledge of how this stuff works --- we even had a commenter yesterday who apparently got the IDP RFP for this application, and turned it down. If your only background in this subject is supporting a particular candidate and reading a conspiracy piece by Matt Stoller, maybe you should ask questions more than make statements.
"Sanders leads the Iowa popular vote, but an unprecedented 40+hr delay lets another candidate, who leads only by a metric so arcane experts can barely explain it, to claim “victory” & media spotlight"
I'm telling you that when there are people on these threads that actually have firsthand knowledge of the subject, and all you've got are citations to Twitter and Matt Stoller, you should ask more questions and make fewer sweeping statements.
Thankfully, this got flagged off the front page, and there's little point in continuing to argue it.
Look: I don't trust any of your premises, and you're obviously sold on them and disinclined to trust any of mine. This isn't a productive conversation. You asked me a direct question: "Are you telling me this is acceptable?". My answer is "NaN". "Parse error". "Homer withdrawing into the hedge". I'm not inclined to have a partisan political argument on HN, and you shouldn't be either.
There are significantly fewer people voting in the Iowa democratic caucus than who live within 10 blocks up or down from me in NYC. Does it matter who got 50 more votes than another candidate? The idea that this tiny number of voters who apparently demand that each candidate personally bake them breakfast determines the fate of our nation is the unacceptable. Have one primary in every state the same day and end this farce.
It’s dangerous to embrace the worst case scenario like corruption with open arms and requiring little evidence. People are doing it all the time now and it’s how the trolls win.
Look at how they are making it look like Pete is the winner so far. This is what stays in people's minds. Later we will find out Bernie won, but the effect won't be as strong. It's like when a newspaper makes a correction, most people don't see it.
That's a different problem -- it's the politics as sport/entertainment model that 24x7 "news" outlets need to survive.
Pete's camp has fanned the flames on that and he's been identified as the more interesting candidate, with lots of drama. My guess is that it won't last. A similar thing happened with the GOP in 2016. You had a collection of boring candidates in a never ending campaign. Trump's erratic nature made him a novelty that attracted attention.
IMO, if we are stuck with these stupid news channels, we need a new distraction... a kid stuck in a well, another OJ, whatever. Years of constant attention on inane politics is too much of a grind.
People invent conspiracies to explain things they don't like and don't understand. The facts, and the effectiveness of the invented conspiracy, are irrelevant.
It was a total lack of understanding of a product/market fit.
Election volunteers are in a demographic that is targeted by the likes of Consumer Cellular ( data? we dont need that. We just want to call our friends once a month) , GranPad (a tablet with a VERY BIG button - tap here to make a video call to your family ) and AARP.
Someone needs to be out to lunch to think they would download an app, authenticate to it and be able to submit election results using it even with multi month of training.
There’s an extremely interesting and important discussion to be had around what happened with an App in Iowa, but TFA seems like the wrong plank to walk off of to have it.
Maybe one day we will have an honest and true post mortem of what happened on Monday. Reports have been conflicting and non-sensical. No one that I can find has managed to actually show the app in question in detail, what numbers were meant to be reported, and how it actually all fell apart.
I’ve heard explanations ranging from caucus chairs unable to login to the app, to the result reports coming out of the app being corrupted. Days later we’re still at only 70% precincts reporting and a race still too close to call. For what was apparently, a fairly low turnout event.
We’re talking about a web form collecting like 6 integer values from 1,765 precincts, right?
That's exactly what I'm not getting. Everybody is discussing scalability problems, but as far as I've seen it all comes down to ~2K users and ~2K consequent form submissions. I can understand juniority, but here even a kid could've handled this kind of "scale"
They had backup plans in place where the precincts would just phone their results in. (as you would expect) ... except nobody was answering the phones.
They were interviewing people on TV who were trying to report their precincts results over the phone, and were interviewing them while on hold. I remember one guy saying he's been waiting for hours for someone to answer.
The app is a scapegoat because people are willing to accept "testing in production" as something that just happens, instead of what in reality should be considered gross negligence.
Yep. They've obviously had much longer than needed to simply report the values via paper and telephone calls, so the only reason you don't know those numbers now is that the party possesses them and is declining to release them.
I believe it's perfectly legitimate to speculate about why the party might be declining to release them and to make adverse inferences. The time delay granted by claiming "technical problems" has been exceeded.
To me, the Iowa Caucus Fiasco™️ is best explained by incompetence and embarrassment. A bug in the app caused it to fail, call centers overwhelmed, and a bunch of people who had been at the caucus for hours probably tried to take the reporting into their own hands, and caused even more delays.
Verifying the results that were scribbled on an undated piece of paper by 1600+ volunteers is not an easy task. [Esp after the fact, when the whole verification was centered around username / pw / 2fa / + pin, which may have not been readily accessible for call-center use].
The Des Moine Register poll was scrapped for less, which is why it feels like a cover-up. Not because of any candidate bias, but because the caucus probably needs to be redone for the results to be credible under scrutiny, or nullified entirely, which would be quite an embarrassment.
I feel really bad for the people who made this thing. It looks like it was mostly interns/people at their first job out of a bootcamp.
It was a mess, sure. My first major project was probably a mess too, except my "mess" would have been looking at a display and going "huh?", not being accused of trying to undermine democracy.
The thing that blows my mind is that they only spend around $60k developing it. Steyer and Bloomberg have spent 400 million dollars combined on ads in South Carolina. Couldn't any of the several billionaires that support the Democrats have kicked down a couple hundred grand for this at least? Even Epstein randomly handed out 100k checks to profs at MIT. It's not that much money for these people.
Its a classical example of government waste and corruption. Some shady company collected millions while interns took blame for their first app not being robust and at the level of banking app. Sadly the winner of this fiasco is Trump.
It was similar with Obamacare website. Done to the tune of $5 billion dollars (!!) it was mostly prepared by IT corporations located in India, the source code is/was terrible with jQuery hosted on some third-party CDN, it was/is a disaster.
As this caucus was administered and paid for by the Iowa Democratic Party, a private corporation, this is not a classical example of government waste and corruption, unless you're making the subsidiary argument that government shouldn't farm out or privatize essential functions like elections, which I would agree with.
> Its a classical example of government waste and corruption.
I agree on the corruption part, but elected governments had very little to do with this. To me that’s a double edged sword - the caucus process could be an independent expression of the will of the people (in theory anyway) but it also isn’t subject to proper scrutiny nor required to be a transparent process.
Funny Matt is usually a straight shooter but didn't mention Tara McGowan (CEO of Acronym; it's on linkedin) is married to Buttigieg senior staffer Michael Halle. Maybe he didn't notice.
key paragraph:
"In this moment in history, the network of institutions that comprise the Democratic Party, from cable news channels to law firms to campaign operative networks to Silicon Valley lobbying outposts like Facebook and Google, are hollow and obviously incompetent."
This seems to be hyperbole, but I am not familiar with Matt Stoller so I reserved judgement and read a number of the back issues of his newsletter (archived at no charge on the site at https://mattstoller.substack.com/ ). I came across this https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/airplanes-and-accounting-... which was written in December and correctly predicts the subsequent collapse of Boeing.
Both articles are well written and insightful, the analysis is not from a political perspective but from a careful review of governance models and the impact of incentives on behavior.
Well you won me over. I do think this guy is trying to honestly shed light on the powers of influence and concentration at work in the industry at large. I’m dubious though about the value of this particular article.
It’s always been a bit of a puzzle for me to define just what the Democratic Party is. There are no formal membership dues, and registration varies by state. Candidates can sometimes run for the party nomination without being a member
As a non-American this kind of stuff has always been a bit bewildering for me. Why is such opacity accepted in the electoral/political process?
Doesn't this always risk shifting power to unknown and unaccountable individuals?
Doesn't this muddying of waters allow for all sorts of hidden conflicts of interest?
Part of the reason is that the framers of the US constitution hated parties, and seemed to take a "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" approach. With no backbone of written law to fall back on, US political parties only rely on their own rules as an organization of people. All the problems you described do affect them, and they used to be even more exclusive and opaque. The candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are fruits of the opening up of parties, effectively allowing takeovers by determined blocks of people.
Which I am happy to blow off when he's writing about random corporations but less sanguine about when his supposed authority on a political topic is the basis for a partisan political debate --- one rooted in conspiracy theories, no less --- on HN.
Gods, why not just take a picture of the voting sheet and send it in. Iowa only has about 1700 voting districts? I could data entry that myself in about 2 hours. Split the work among 10 people, and you'd have it done in 12 minutes.
My guess is either (a) they're hand-counting all the paper backups, and/or (b) campaigns are chiming in and confirming or disputing results before the IDP makes the result public, which means more time for folks to weigh in and more fact-gathering before the public knows the results. And that while this wasn't the plan, the initial things going wrong caused such distrust in the process they felt this was necessary.
This is clearly not an HN appropriate topic from the comments alone. This thread is devolving into a mixture of the worst possible interpretations of what happened with outright lies and misleading representations being used to fuel FUD.
welcome to the shit show that has been present for quite awhile. at least this article up and declares its political while too many are slipped in under the covers and are very easily traced back to one campaign's or another talking points.
just flag every article and maybe enough others will join in and we can get back to pretending to having an agnostic view on this site
- In software engineering it is notoriously difficult to distinguish between capable and incapable companies/individuals. You basically need a very capable person to make the evaluation. But who chooses the evaluator ?
- Even a capable company can screw up by no putting the right people in the project.
- Even one person in a capable team can derail a project.
- A project needs time to ramp up, go from alpha testing to beta testing to production. A project that goes from dev to production in one night has 10x the risk of a regular project.
- 60k is very little money for such a risky project.
1a : to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement
b : scheme
2 : to act in harmony toward a common end
Following the above, a conspiracy can be "the act of working in harmony toward a common end". Otherwise known as Politics. Whether there's a conspiracy here isn't up for debate; by definition a political party is a conspiracy. What's debatable is if they conspired illegally.
Bias Check: I didn't vote Bernie in 2016, I won't be voting Bernie in 2020, and I can honestly say there's not a single politician running that would actually represent my opinions and values.
"It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a community."
I don't know. I have serious doubts about whether or not we're seeing foul-play here. What we know for sure is that the app in question was partially funded by a(at least one) candidate. Essentially, a candidate gave money to the system that counted their votes. The company behind the app was founded by people tied to the Democratic 'establishment' (specifically, Hillary Clinton). And, as far as I can tell, the Democratic party has done everything in their power to ensure the candidate with the most name recognition and popular support in the race (Bernie Sanders) isn't their nominee.
From what I have seen thus far this cycle, and from what I saw in 2016, I can't help but be suspicious.
The idea that the delay(s) hurt Buttigieg in any way is a profound misreading of the situation. Iowa has a small number of delegates, and it's only important in as much as it creates momentum for the winner going into the next three states.
If they released the vote totals on time and Bernie won, that would have given his campaign momentum, which could have lead (still might) to a NH blowout.
Instead, Pete got to "declare victory" twice -- night-of, and again after the 60% release. Now it really doesn't matter if they release the results and Bernie is shown to have won, because we're already multiple news cycles away from caucus night and most people aren't really paying attention, so it's going to be hard for Sanders to capture any momentum, if it's shown he has won.
Pete, on the other hand, got a significant NH bump from the IA results in the latest polls.
I think the only way it's hurt Pete is through IDP incompetence, where to most Americans (who hate a cheater and love a conspiracy theory) it looks, for lack of a better term, extremely shady. It's also fired up Bernie's base of die-hards, who are now on the warpath (or even more so) for the early states
If Buttigieg holds onto the win once 100% of the votes are counted, it'd be clear evidence not only that there was no conspiracy but also that Buttigieg was absolutely robbed.
If the winning number of SDEs does flip to Sanders by the time they're all counted, though, that'll be pretty damning.
I'm currently on the "no conspiracy" train, since a caucus is pretty hard to fabricate.
At the time the theories were put forward, Sanders supporters believed Sanders was to come out in front, so they thought the delay was harming him. Both sanders and Buttigieg were claiming their internal numbers showed them in front.
Sanders may yet come out ahead when full results come out - the betting markets put it at 25%, so the theorists might yet be right that the delay hurt Sanders the most (not necessarily right about their theories, but I sympathise with the general level of paranoia - although an given theory probably isn't correct, I think those dismissing them all as crazy lack imagination).
Arguably, since by all accounts Sanders performed much better than Biden (who is seen as Sander's main competition, not Buttigieg), it's still relevant that the delay hurt well-performing candidates in Iowa (Sanders and Buttigieg) and benefited poorly performing candidates (Biden).
You are going to vote though, correct? Lesser of two evils and all that.
If you do not make your voice known, you will be out into the same camp as voter apathy, at which point why should those running care about you if you don't vote?
Supporting either party at this point goes against my moral values. Both parties support war (or other violent action) and I refuse to support any such action that isn't purely defensive. That issue alone is a disqualifying factor for me, and I care about more than one issue.
That said, I'll continue to support individual issues I care about, and I'll happily call my reps to tell them how they could earn my vote.
People running for office ought to care about all of the people in their voting district. Children can't and don't vote but their interests ought to be looked after by politicians. Wouldn't it be a sad state of affairs that those who run for office are only expected to care about people who can potentially and directly help them? I believe we Americans have mostly come to the point of accepting this as normative.
The real issue is that voting anyway doesn't solve the problem of not having a truly representative candidate, and a two party system which has a duopolistic stranglehold on the moral character of the nation.
The correct approach is to run and compete, but the disparity in financial amplification created by the two established parties keeps anything from being able to take root.
Unfortunately there is a large number of people who somehow feel apathy and silence is the best way to get attention in a huge crowd of people making their choices known.
Our culture is good at creating very individualistic princes and princes. No compromise whatsoever. My way or the highway.
It's not at all clear to me that this is the case. I mean, sure, there are obviously big problems with the app's design and implementation. But there are ample signs of deeper problems with the customer (and indeed, TFA alludes to some of it).
The fact that the Party insisted on keeping specifics about the app secret until the last minute was the first big red flag to me. With the customer making such a demand about a product that's intended to be widely distributed with zero ramp-up time, they had at least two strikes against them from the start.
Further mess-ups outside the app development, like using the same phone lines for support and for reporting, are mistakes that don't obviously fall on the shoulders of the developer.
The customer - the Iowa Democratic Party - probably needs to bear at least part of the blame for this. It's true that an experienced developer might have given their customer better guidance, but that doesn't absolve the Party from these mistakes.