The first major contest of the U.S. presidential primary season did not go as planned.
All eyes were on the Iowa caucuses Monday, as registered locals voted to nominate a party candidate.
But technical issues with a new phone app used for reporting the Iowa Democratic Party’s results have marred the start of a highly contested race.
“We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results,” IDP communications director Mandy McClure said in a statement, tweeted by The Hill correspondent Reid Wilson and CNN tech reporter Brian Fung.
“This is simply a reporting issue,” McClure confirmed. “The app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report results.”
No timeline has been announced; as of this article’s publication, the IDP Caucus 2020 Results page remained untouched.
The app was conceived as a way for local officials who oversee individual caucuses to send results from each of the nearly 1,700 sites to the Iowa Democratic Party for final checks.
Those unable to use the application on Monday (i.e. everyone) were forced to wait on hold for hours as the party hotline became overwhelmed with call-ins.
The IDP first used a mobile app to report results in 2016; before that, all numbers were submitted by phone.
While most states hold a presidential primary, political parties in Iowa have used caucuses to select candidates since the 1800s; the state’s quadrennial gatherings became first in the nation in 1972.
But, as Asian/Pacific Islander Caucus Chair for the IDP Holly Christine Brown pointed out, the sixth whitest state in the US has correctly selected the eventual Republican and Democratic nominees with only 50 percent and 43 percent accuracy, respectively.
(New Hampshire—the second state in the primary season—is the third whitest in the country.)
“It appears that nothing, other than tradition, is keeping Iowa first,” Brown wrote in a column for Iowa newspaper The Gazette.
“Voting needs to be accessible, and the first states voting in our nominating contests should be representative of the population of our nation,” she continued. “Iowa is no more deserving of being first than any other state. If we truly value the diversity of our country, we must allow the honor of being first in the nation to be passed on.”
Nearly 2,000 miles to the west, Seattle’s King County is taking mobile voting to the next level: Folks can now log into a web portal to cast their ballot in the King Conservation District Board of Supervisors contest.
Electronic entries returned by 8 p.m. PT on Feb. 11 (election day) will be printed and counted toward the final tally.
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