Poor Planning
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The Iowa caucus is able to turn no-names like 1970’s Jimmy Carter into President Carter and entirely crush the hopes of established politicians at achieving the status of being leader of the free world. This is because the Iowa caucus is first in the nation, our results reflect a nationwide trend and can show a trend of candidates either receiving support enmasse or failing miserably. The party representatives in Iowa, like Andy McGuire, justify the state having this much power and responsibility by saying things like “The real reason we’re first in the nation now is because of what we do. We take this really seriously.” However, for how seriously Iowans claim to take it, it seems that little to no planning went into this very important event. The backup lines had hour plus wait times, none of the officials touched the application or software to ensure that it worked until the night of, and in the end the results were delayed repeatedly and were so inaccurate that a lot of outlets blatantly refused to report the data they were given
The Backup Phone Lines
Since no one had planned for things to go belly up and the call room to be overwhelmed with calls, to the point of there being hours-long wait times, there was nothing in place to mitigate any of it. Volunteers began hanging up on both prank callers and real volunteers, trying to report actual data as it became harder to tell them apart. This led to the DNC having to declare an emergency and reroute the calls to their more prepared headquarters in Washington.
Not Testing The Application
It should go without saying that if the success of an event hinges on a certain thing, that that thing needs to be tested rigorously and ensured to work. Musicians will do mic checks and check their instruments, programmers will do unit tests and check for edge cases, however, it seems that none of the organizers did any of that. None of them even attempting to log in and only finding they can’t get in the night of the event. The volunteers that oversaw the organizers realizing that they don’t know how to troubleshoot the application, and the people at Shadow Inc. not immediately knowing what the issue was.
The Poor Results
As a result of the poor planning and all the other entirely avoidable incidents falling into place, the results of the caucus were delayed multiple times to try to ensure that the data was correct. However, due to all of the issues with data reporting, data accuracy, and even non-reporting of data and issues, the final report was deemed too inaccurate to morally use by publications like the Associated Press. This whole incident could have been avoided and the entire night could have run smoothly and without delay if they just used a blind ballot system like the republicans have since 1970, without issue.