Poor Training
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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 en masse 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, there seems to be a massive lack of training up and down the chain of command. From a CFO causing a delay because they were unable to operate Google Sheets, to the inability to take pictures with a phone, to the inability to deal with political campaigns or their own workers on the phone, to being unable to control the crowds and tempers the night of the caucus.
The Google Sheets Fiasco
Melissa Watson is the Chief Financial Officer for the Democratic Party of Iowa. She was in charge of the 2020 caucus night “boiler room” in Des Moines, which is what Iowa Democrats call their understaffed call center, and was supposed to be the one to verify data gathered by app and phone and input it all into a spreadsheet via Google Sheets. The only issue being that she didn’t know how to work the software as she had never been taught/learned how to use it. This led to people having to step in and take over for her to ensure that the job was done both correctly and in a timely manner.
The Email Issues
Those having issues with the app were told to either call in their results, or just email them in, as we’ll touch on later the phones were unreachable that night, so most people opted to email their results in. The issue started when it turned out that the majority of people emailing in their results didn’t really know how to take a picture with their phone. The pictures that came in were sideways and most were blurry and hard to read on top of that. This wouldn’t be that big of an issue if they actually had someone checking the emails that were coming in. By Tuesday morning, there were more than seven hundred unread emails that had piled up in the inbox. This only served to add to the already large delay in obtaining accurate results for the 2020 caucus.
The Phone Failures
Those that chose to call in and dictate their results to the Iowa Democrats were faced with hours-long wait times thanks. This was because none of the volunteers or workers had proper expectations, or were trained for the fiasco that was unfolding throughout the night. The phone calls started to pick up early in the evening as people were reporting issues with the application and steadily became overwhelming as people who were trying to report results began having to battle with campaigns trying to find out what was going on and the general public calling to prank them. That’s right—the number to reach the secret operations room was given to Trump supporters and other Iowa Republicans who began calling into the line to mess with workers and clog up resources. The workers and volunteers, having expected a slow night and being told to bring a game to occupy themselves, were dealing with this by just hanging up on people. People that were trying to report results got the same treatment as campaigns and pranksters: a click and the sound of a dial tone as the workers hung up on them after their hours wait to speak with anyone.
The Screaming Situation
As was talked about here, the Iowa Democratic Caucus is a round-based event where each candidate needs fifteen percent of the total room to be considered viable for nomination. This inevitably leads to general attendees and organizers promising everything under the sun, including an organizer promising a woman she can meet the candidate and stand with him on stage. However, drowning out all of that out are the screaming matches that the organizers try to control but find themselves unable to even attempt. It goes from harmless things like screaming a candidate’s name as a group to individuals screaming threats and insults at each other over a difference of opinion. The spectacle ends after a winner is declared and tempers start dying down.
