
App Used to Tabulate Votes Is Said to Have Been Inadequately Tested - jbredeche
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/us/politics/iowa-caucus-app.html
======
ericmay
Why can’t we just count votes by hand? To me this is over optimization and
really just helps a special interest group who wants to sell apps and voting
machines. It’s not like we pay a lot of money for election volunteers.

~~~
nabla9
Bruce Schneier thinks that the best compromise is to to have paper ballots
that can be counted by a machine or by hand. If all observers agree the vote
was right, machine count stands. If someone challenges the vote, you count by
hand.

~~~
scott_s
The caucuses are not normal elections: there are no ballots. The results are
literally counting where people in a room are standing and recording that on a
spreadsheet. The problem has been relaying that spreadsheet to the party.

~~~
Loughla
It feels like a caucus exists to arbitrarily filter out participants based on
how long they take. Not everyone has the 2-3 hours to spend on a caucus vote.
Why don't they just vote via paper ballot?

~~~
couchand
It's worth noting that the caucus is supposed to be much more than just
registering your presidential preference. The idea is that you have a regular
gathering with your neighbors to discuss political concerns. That most people
view it as an elaborate and slow version of a primary is an indictment of how
sad the state of political participation in our country is.

That being said, it is an excellent way to exclude people who have other
responsibilities or difficulty making it out for several hours on a week
night.

~~~
333c
It sounds like it's good at excluding a number of participants: those with
physical disabilities, parents of young children, minimum wage workers who
can't get time off, on-duty medical and emergency personnel, etc.

~~~
couchand
As a point of interest, those last groups are theoretically covered. I've
heard of a concept of workplace caucus groups, where voters who can't get away
(like medical staff) can be counted with others on the same shift. I have no
idea how prevalent that is, and right now I can't find any relevant
documentation either, so maybe it's not really a thing?

------
jordanpg
The naivety on the part of the various parties involved here is breathtaking.

It is interesting to observe how little distinction non-technical users are
aware of between high quality and comically buggy software because of the ease
of producing flashy UIs these days. They have no idea how the sausage gets
made. No idea.

I have never seen a stronger case for the need to have third-party
certification and testing of software and the people involved in building it.

~~~
thomk
I'm getting voted down for mentioning this in another section of this
discussion, but, is this not the perfect use case for open source? The
certification is anyone and everyone can double check the source code. If this
is a bad idea, I would appreciate the feedback, because, it is my
understanding that a big draw of using OSS is transparency.

~~~
ken
"Open source" has a couple different related meanings, and it's not clear
exactly which aspect you mean, or how it would help here.

\- A license which allows the source code to be redistributed under the same
terms as it was received? The problem with these boxes isn't that people can't
redistribute it.

\- A collaborative model for creating software? Possibly -- though there have
been some high-profile cases of security issues sneaking into these, too.
Modern voting machines also seem to have a huge stack of dependencies, which
mean the surface area for exploit is much larger than the voting software
itself. Would you require a fully open-source stack, and how far down?

OSS is great for transparency _for the person receiving the software_ (in this
case, the jurisdictions operating the machines), but if those people don't
care to audit it (or redistribute it to others who wish to), that doesn't buy
them anything.

I'd much rather see a rule requiring voting software to be publicly viewable
by any voter in the jurisdiction, regardless of the software license it's sold
under.

~~~
thomk
What I mean is a variation of all of the above.

Transparency, an open license, collaboration, distribution, best practices and
more.

Clearly I do not expect districts to independently inspect and verify source
code any more that we are inspecting and verifying the web server running this
website.

Computers (or at a minimum binaries) could be distributed and have self
checking as the boot. They could simply be used to tally paper ballots (as
others have mentioned) or to transmit votes.

The overarching point is if we can do 5 trillion dollars of electronic money
transfers worldwide per DAY certainly we can use open source to accurately,
securely and transparently count and tally votes.

Do we need even more governmental oversight? I would like to see a bulletproof
technological solution that I personally can verify if I choose to.

------
dkarl
The naivety is in adding error-checking on top of a caucus process with a
notoriously complex set of rules that have been executed by hand, by humans at
over a thousand different precincts for many decades, and then hold up the
results when -- shocker -- you realize a large number of precincts are
reporting results that show evidence of mistakes or inconsistent
interpretation of the rules.

Any commercial software company with thousands of data entry users would
regard it as a massive mistake to suddenly, overnight, begin rejecting all
data that wasn't in compliance with a complex set of rules that most people
can't explain. You'd bring a smoothly running business to a grinding,
embarrassing halt.

Of course all the individual precinct officials whose result were rejected are
going to blame the app. Why not? The makers of the app didn't have a mandate
to fix the caucus process. And of course when people's accuracy and competence
are called into question they will do everything they can to discredit the
source.

I don't know if that's what happened, but it's consistent with what we're
observing: the state office is saying they're trying to resolve
inconsistencies in the returns, and the precincts are blaming the app.

The right thing to do would have been to use software to measure the
prevailing level of data quality and compliance with the state official's
interpretation of the rules, and decide later whether to do anything about it
in 2024, if ever.

~~~
Balgair
American party nominations have been, are currently, and will forever be a
total Charlie Foxtrot.

The Democratic 1860 Conventions were so bad they decided to put up two
candidates, had to do it over a few times, had many walkouts, and effectively
seceded Lincoln the Presidency and engulfed the nation in war as a result. It
was so bad it literally was a cause of the Civil War.

The 1912 Republican Convention literally split the party, with the fisticuffs
and black eyes to prove it. Edumnd Morris has a good bit on that one and the
hijinks, corruption, vote-selling, and smoke filled rooms in his _Theodore
Rex_ series. To us today, it's ghastly.

I think it was the 1952 National Conventions that really exposed to the public
what a mess it all is, as they were the first ones to be televised. During the
process people intentionally lit newspapers on fire in order to cause chaos
(my memory is a bit fuzzy here though).

The 1964 Republican convention at SF's Cow Palace, dubbed Conservative
Woodstock, was more of a Nazi rally than anything else. Reporters had racial
and sexist slurs screamed at them until they ran for their lives.

The state caucuses are a reflection of these conventions and America itself;
drunken, insane, corrupt, spectacle.

~~~
dkarl
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. I think people inside the apparatus
of both parties see the arcane and chaotic aspects of the process as their
chance to put their fingers on the scales, and I wouldn't be surprised if
that's what this brouhaha in Iowa is about -- a fight between people at the
precinct level who want to maintain their power to influence the results by
interpreting the rules this way or that, and people at the state level who
want to iron out these "irregularities" (probably while maintaining any power
they have at the state level to perpetrate similar shenanigans.)

The public can and should put pressure on the parties to adopt more legible
and transparent processes.

------
mikeappell
From what I was reading, many of the people responsible for reporting the
results hadn't even _downloaded_ the app until the night of, or if they had,
hadn't ever logged into it on their phones.

Ridiculous.

~~~
pkilgore
Or, maybe, a lesson technologists should internalize when we advocate
technical solutions to real world problems.

Apple moved a reply button on the iPhone email app -- and I know someone that
for weeks just thought it was broken and would text responses to emails
entirely out of context.

This person had a Ph.D.

~~~
elyobo
It was apparently a common confusion.

[https://daringfireball.net/2019/10/mails_message_action_tool...](https://daringfireball.net/2019/10/mails_message_action_toolbar_in_ios_13)

~~~
machello13
To be fair, the button was still there and still had the same icon. It's bad
design for other reasons, but I'm not sure how you could think it was
completely broken just because it moved a couple dozen pixels to the right.

------
cipherboy
HuffPost has some more details here:

\- State campaign finance records indicate the Iowa Democratic Party paid
Shadow, a tech company that joined with ACRONYM last year, more than $60,000
for “website development” over two installments in November and December of
last year.

\- The Iowa Democratic Party had refused to reveal details about the app,
including the company behind it and what security measures were being taken to
safeguard the results, arguing that it made the technology more vulnerable to
hackers.

\- In 2018, the group funded an onslaught of ads on platforms like Facebook
and Google.

[https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iowa-caucus-app-
shadow_n_5e39...](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iowa-caucus-app-
shadow_n_5e390191c5b687dacc722824?lng)

~~~
freddie_mercury
Is $60,000 supposed to be a lot? That's, like, 2 developers for November and
December.

~~~
333c
If anything it sounds like they paid next to nothing for an app and then got
what they paid for.

~~~
inkeddeveloper
My thoughts exactly.

------
reilly3000
I was recently asked by a friend to help my local county's Democrats to
evaluate and recommend a volunteer organizing app. I sort of expected a
medium-sized non-profit with some What I found was an all-volunteer group that
is incredibly dedicated, but under-resourced with an extremely shallow tech
bench and no technical leadership whatsoever. I saw things that made me
shudder as a developer:

\- Nobody knows how to use the CMS, so no new content in months.

\- Their site lists a dated version of their team, with _personal_ emails on
the public web, since nobody knows how how to set up new mail accounts under
their domain. They get destroyed with spam.

\- I overhead a volunteer clicking really rapid fire, like 100 times in a
minute. I probed a bit and found that is how they send out messages. Its
something straight out of the excellent "How to Automate the Boring Stuff"

\- All data has to be manually entered into 2 systems, and they want to add a
3rd.

All of those things and 100 others could be fixed expediently, but there is
literally nobody to do it, and no committee that handles that role. My day job
in a journalistic organization means I really cannot engage in partisan
political work, but I'm just itching to help.

If you are progressively-minded and want to make a difference in 2020
elections, please show up and help. There is plenty of work to be done, and
shockingly few volunteers or staff with the skills you have, HN reader.

~~~
dorkwood
I think clicking manually to send messages might be a legal thing. I'm not
sure they're allowed to send automated messages. Can anyone confirm?

------
Slartie
Just call people by phone and read off some numbers from paper. Then confirm
them by reading them the other way round. Yes, it is actually that easy!!!
People have transmitted vote counts this way forever, long before apps were a
thing.

You can even use your goddamn smartphone to make the call, if you need that in
order to feel "modern" enough. But don't make a shitty app for every one-time
event that doesn't need a hundred additional failure modes for essentially no
benefit whatsoever.

~~~
NopeNotToday
Agreed, the app was a stupid idea.

The backup plan was to call in. However, they only had 12 callers ready to
take calls, for ~1800 precincts. At 3 minutes per call, that is 7+ hours to
call in the results.

~~~
Slartie
They should have rather invested a tiny share of the money spent on that
dysfunctional app on one of those gig working websites to rent themselves some
personnel for the evening to take calls. Could have even marketed that as
"Woah, see how INNOVATIVE and MODERN we are, we're using this gig working
thing!".

Combine that with renting a solid and battle-tested VoIP solution for a few
days to supply the short-term workers with (soft-)phones and the precincts
with numbers to call, the story gets even better from a marketing perspective
- now they could add the punchline "See, we're using INTERNET TELEPHONY hosted
in THE CLOUD!".

------
code4tee
The only thing clear about the results at this point is that Iowa will
probably be fired from their first in the nation status on voting.

If there was ever a use for the phrase “You had one job!”

~~~
Miner49er
Iowa has a law that it holds its primaries 8 days before the first state. Not
sure how you can change that without having them change that law.

~~~
NopeNotToday
This is a state law, not federal. Iowa state law has no standing over other
states. If the DNC decides Nevada would be first, what options does Iowa have?

Iowa cannot enforce that law outside of Iowa.

~~~
krn
> If the DNC decides Nevada would be first, what options does Iowa have?

As I understand, it's up to each state to select the date.

~~~
dragonwriter
It's up to each party to set the rules on how delegates can be selected,
including time, place, and manner.

Within certain bounds they have historically not gotten into the weeds too
much on timing, but they certainly could.

~~~
krn
> It's up to each party to set the rules on how delegates can be selected,
> including time, place, and manner.

It seems that Iowa chose both, the time and the manner, itself[1]:

> Because Iowa had a complex process of precinct caucuses, county conventions,
> district conventions, and a state convention, they chose to start early. In
> 1972, Iowa was the first state to hold its Democratic caucus, and it had the
> first Republican caucus four years later.

> Under Iowa law, political parties are required to hold caucuses every two
> years to select delegates to county conventions and party committees.

And each party must respect the laws of the state.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_caucuses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_caucuses)

~~~
dragonwriter
> It seems that Iowa chose both, the time and the manner, itself

Well, no, not entirely. Yes, the parties gave them lots of room initially, but
that has evolved. The _entire reason they were using the app at issue this
year_ is because after complaints about apparent inconsistencies in the
results based on internal reports (there was previously no official tally of
the intermediate steps), the DNC directed that to the Iowa Democratic Party
must adapt the method so that there were official, reported tallies of the
first and second alignments as well as the state delegate equivalent count
that is the final result. That is, the national party chose (in a very limited
way, for now) to exercise it's fairly absolute power to direct the manner by
which delegates to it's nominating conventions are selected. (Aside from this
specific intervention, the DNC also has extensive general rules adopted for
the delegate selection process, see, for 2020, generally Regulation 4 of the
Regulations of the Rules and Bylaws Committee for the 2020 Democratic National
Convention.

There is nothing stopping the DNC from making much more exacting requirements,
including setting a required schedule or prohibiting the use of caucuses
entirely.

> And each party must respect the laws of the state.

Each party has an incentive to do so to avoid conflict with interest groups in
the state, but state governments have basically no compulsory power to direct
how party national committees allow delegates to nominating conventions to be
selected from their state.

------
patwolf
Having built an app that was used for a one time event by a group of people
that weren't necessarily tech savvy, I do empathize with the situation.

However, If I had $63,000 to build a solution (a price mentioned in a wsj
article), I think there are better ways to do this without an app. The problem
with relying on an app for a one-time, time-sensitive event is that you'll
ultimately run into people that don't know how to download the app, have a
phone that can't run the app, don't remember how to authenticate, or are
simply confused as to how to use it. No matter how many emails you send out
before hand reminding people to install the app and how to use it, some amount
of people simply ignore it.

~~~
cm2187
A simple website that doesn't need to be pretty. Raw html, no css, no
javascript.

~~~
rtkwe
You also need authentication and security. HN has a definite anti-JS
fanaticism that strikes me as unhelpful.

~~~
cm2187
If you think javascript is of any use to authentication and security...

In this case stripping out css and javascript is to make the website
functional in low bandwidth conditions.

~~~
rtkwe
If we're optimizing for low bandwidth the app they went with is even better
(with captains actually preloading) because all you have to pass is the auth
and results information no html at all...

------
tomlong
Am I right in thinking the app is used by one person per precinct as well? I'm
surprised they hadn't tested even at this scale, we're not talking hundreds of
thousands of events a second here, surely. It's hard to imagine how they could
be under resourced and untested for a really predictable amount of
simultaneous traffic.

~~~
sailfast
The interface was the confusing part, not the responsiveness. Caucus precinct
chiefs skew older, the app was not part of their training, and they waited
until the last minute to download.

This doesn’t really seem like something to pin on the app exclusively - it’s a
change management failure on the part of the party, underlined by the fact
that even their normal phone lines were overloaded due to new data reporting
requirements.

I wasn’t on the ground or anything (I’m a complete outsider who read the news)
but this seems like a lot to pin on some app developers when the issues were
spread pretty far. It’s damnably hard to train 1800 users spread across a
state with varying levels of experience.

~~~
inkeddeveloper
I blame the app developers for pitching such an idea in the first place.

~~~
sailfast
Yeah... after more news has come out it looks like this was quite buggy. Not
to mention they had two months to build it.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/us/politics/iowa-
caucus-s...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/us/politics/iowa-caucus-
shadow-app.html)

------
curveship
From twitter user @XMPPwocky:

\- each precinct got a PIN to report their results

\- the PINs were printed on the paper result worksheets sent to precinct
captains

\- multiple precincts and participants posted pictures of their worksheets to
Twitter, with the PINS clearly visible

\- hence multiple PINs were compromised

[https://twitter.com/XMPPwocky/status/1224563396873351169](https://twitter.com/XMPPwocky/status/1224563396873351169)

~~~
Corrado
It just keeps getting worse and worse...

------
speps
Does someone know if it could be related to this?

[https://mobile.twitter.com/adelcambre/status/122455902387103...](https://mobile.twitter.com/adelcambre/status/1224559023871033344)

~~~
sswaner
That is the tally sheet used by the precinct captain and secretary to
calculate the viability number (the number of supporters needed for candidate
to earn a delegate) and then the apportionment of delegates based on
supporters.

My precinct had these on the table where the staff was coordinating the
caucus.

~~~
SyneRyder
I think the point is that the pin code to login to the app is printed on the
top right corner of the tally sheet. Now that various people have been posting
photos of tally sheets online - in the case of this tweet, a staffer for Paul
Buttigieg - the concern is that members of the public have been trying out the
app and pin codes just to see if it would work, and modifying the submitted
numbers.

Though according to the spokeswoman for the Iowa Democrats in the NYTimes
article, they don't believe any of the 3 reporting discrepancies are the
result of an intrusion.

There's more discussion about this over on the other HN thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22232737](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22232737)

------
AndrewBissell
These problems were easy to see coming, and predicted by many security
experts. The Wall Street Journal ran an article on it January 27 but no
attention was paid and here we are. [https://www.wsj.com/articles/dems-iowa-
caucus-voting-app-sti...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/dems-iowa-caucus-
voting-app-stirs-security-concerns-11580063221)

------
samdoidge
Shambles. It sounds like there was no load-testing.

~~~
chatmasta
We're not talking web-scale here, either. There are 1,600 caucus sites in
Iowa. My understanding is that only the organizers/officials even need this on
their phones. So we're talking on the order of 10-20k users, max.

My intuition is that the bigger problem is with the caucus format itself, and
especially the new rule changes. The app, with its strict data entry
requirements, likely didn't cover a lot of corner cases and so people had to
call in to ask what to do. There was one caucus on TV last night that had
problems because a bunch of people left after first alignment and organizers
didn't know how to tally their votes.

When some confusion -- any confusion -- happens, that doesn't fit into the
app's forms, people are not going to trust it and will revert to calling the
IDP/DNC offices to see how to proceed.

~~~
tomlong
This makes more sense to me than actually the app melting down under load
which was implied from some reporting.

Then if the Iowa DNC (or whoever) didn't staff up the phones to the usual
levels as expecting most results to come through the app, you can kind of get
to how something this ridiculous happened...

Either way it's a complete lack of pretty basic testing/training, whether it's
with real life users or the scale of the app, or whatever it was, they seem
like pretty preventable problems from the outside looking in.

------
coldcode
Testing is more than making sure the code works - you have to understand how
it will be used, who will use it, how it is designed to be used by them, and
even is the app even necessary. This sounds like no one gave much thought to
any of this.

~~~
thomk
Welcome to government.

------
JoeAltmaier
Not quite 'votes'. Its delegates being chosen in a caucus. Different from a
vote, in that 'one person-one vote' isn't how it works. You go stand in a
group that wants a delegate chosen for a candidate. If your group is too small
to earn a delegate, then you wander away to a larger group. Or maybe combine
two small groups and wrangle which candidate your delegate will 'declare' for.

And yes, paper documents were created this year to facilitate
counting/recounting.

------
AzzieElbab
Shadow inc build a shady app? Honestly, sounds like they are contesting
unexpected results

------
zeveb
I am reminded of Senator Romney's campaign's ill-fated ORCA[0] from 2012,
which was apparently not well-tested prior to rollout. Seems like technical-
project failure does not respect party lines.

0:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCA_(computer_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCA_\(computer_system\))

~~~
creaghpatr
Far more forgivable offense in 2012 than 2020 though.

------
user234683
How much more secure would it be for precincts to phone in the results? Phone
numbers are trivial to spoof. Perhaps the party headquarters could call the
precincts instead of the precincts calling the headquarters. But that still
leaves questions about the security of the telephone system itself, even with
the spoofing issue out of the way. Are there any alternatives other than
phoning in the results?

------
nextstep
The Sanders campaign had an internal app to keep their own tally, in case
something just like this happened:
[https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/sanders-campaign-
release...](https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/sanders-campaign-release-
caucus-numbers-iowa-buttigieg/)

~~~
rtkwe
Interesting difference in the numbers, Pete's camp was talking about 77% of
their captains reporting vs Sanders reporting (roughly) how many actual
precincts they they had results from. Makes it really hard to think about who
has the more accurate numbers.

------
claudeganon
The nebulous, shifting accounts about who is actually behind this app, both
before and after the caucuses, doesn’t exactly inspire confidence:

[https://mobile.twitter.com/lhfang/status/1224561674679488513](https://mobile.twitter.com/lhfang/status/1224561674679488513)

[https://mobile.twitter.com/ryangrim/status/12246004685523271...](https://mobile.twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1224600468552327168)

Nor does Buttigeig declaring victory before _any_ results have been reported
and his comms director tweeting out internal election tallying forms with some
kind of PIN data that I imagine should’ve been kept concealed:

[https://mobile.twitter.com/bhalle87/status/12245589259467939...](https://mobile.twitter.com/bhalle87/status/1224558925946793985)

~~~
sswaner
In my precinct (suburb west of Des Moines) there were observers from the
Buttigieg, Yang, Sanders, and Warren campaign. After the first tally, the
precinct captains for the campaigns (the people working the room for votes)
would run to the back of the room where the observers were standing and report
their tally. The Yang and Buttigieg observers would then use some app on their
phone, presumably to report these numbers to their campaign.

None of that seems abnormal, Buttigieg's claim to victory is based on him
winning by the equivalent of an exit poll.

~~~
claudeganon
Declaring victory under these circumstances is certainly abnormal. And moreso
in Pete’s case since the group developing the app appear to have been paid by
and in favor of his campaign. I don’t even think Sanders should’ve done this
in response to Buttigeig.

------
claudeganon
There’s a lot of good technical and failed opsec discussion in this thread,
which people should check out:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22232737](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22232737)

------
russfink
Does anyone have screenshots or more info about this app?

------
thomk
How is there not widespread open source software for voting out there? It
seems like this type of problem could be avoided by creating public software.

~~~
zach_garwood
Because electronic voting is a solution looking for a problem. Paper voting
works and has worked for centuries. There's no need to bring
apps/smartphones/whatever into this equation.

------
huffmsa
Daily reminder that "well it works locally" is an entirely different animal
than "it works at scale".

Scale, especially efficient scale, is hard.

------
tuke
No! How could that be?

------
dadarepublic
Paper & electronic. If electronic fails or is called into question, you
manually count the paper.

I had thought this was the standard. I guess I was wrong?

~~~
dadarepublic
Why was I downvoted? I was asking a question on my assumption I am assuming
was wrong.

I am truly baffled sometimes.

------
buboard
why was this an app and not a website? are apps considered more secure or sth?

~~~
GarrisonPrime
I’m just guessing it was a combination of (1) an app could be distributed /
authorized to only specific email addresses, so far less chance of
interruption than you’d get if the website got leaked to the public, and (2)
wanting to simplify the reporting logistics by just having people use their
private phones, rather than having to set up laptops and internet, and
possibly (3) an attempt to stick a toe into the realm of widespread voting by
app.

Of course there’s always the possibility it’s a simple matter of (4) someone
lobbying politicians into giving money to his brother to slap together an app,
because government money.

~~~
CWuestefeld
It's not government money. This is a party function, and the parties are
private organizations, not official parts of the government.

(That said, I don't understand why the cost of primaries and, presumably,
these caucus events, fall on local taxpayers.)

------
wunderland
The Sanders campaign hedged against such an error occurring and had their own
internal app to track caucus numbers:
[https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/sanders-campaign-
release...](https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/sanders-campaign-release-
caucus-numbers-iowa-buttigieg/)

No surprise, it shows Bernie Sanders winning solidly. This whole situation
reeks of the DNC trying to stunt his momentum.

~~~
phkahler
One would think the person with the most votes is their best hope. But
apparently the leadership thinks they know better than data.

~~~
cableshaft
It seems there are people in the Democratic establishment that would rather
have 4 more years of Trump than elect a non-establishment Democrat they can't
control. At least with Trump they can spend 4 years pointing to him and saying
what a disaster he is to better position themselves for next election.

Here's an Op-Ed piece that makes that argument:
[https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/15/it-clear-
estab...](https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/15/it-clear-
establishment-and-corporate-media-would-prefer-trump-reelection-president)

And I would even argue that it's not always best to go with the person who
gets the most votes amongst the Democrats. Most Democrats and Republicans will
vote for their party in the election, no matter who the nominee is.

So I would think the best person to win the election would be a candidate that
is able to get the most support from across the aisle, from Independents and
Republicans.

This election, it seems like the top candidates for that are Yang, Biden, or
Tulsi, based on what few articles I can find on the matter.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/right-leaning-voters-
support...](https://www.businessinsider.com/right-leaning-voters-support-
andrew-yang-2020-1)

[https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/476265-poll-gop-voters-
dra...](https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/476265-poll-gop-voters-drawn-to-
biden-more-than-other-2020-democrats)

[https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/tulsi-gabbards-
suppo...](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/tulsi-gabbards-support-
skews-conservative-and-male.html)

But it doesn't seem like the DNC cares about that as much as long as one of
the establishment candidates wins the nomination (Biden, Buttigieg, Warren,
Kloubuchar).

~~~
phkahler
>> Most Democrats and Republicans will vote for their party in the election,
no matter who the nominee is.

>> So I would think the best person to win the election would be a candidate
that is able to get the most support from across the aisle, from Independents
and Republicans.

Well that means picking a candidate specifically for the swing votes, which
may be very different than what party members want. In other words someone
that almost nobody likes. But hey, they can win. Because people will vote
their party regardless.

