
Iowa Caucuses, the Blob, and the Democratic Party Cartel - simonpure
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/iowa-caucuses-the-blob-and-the-democratic
======
CWuestefeld
_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.

~~~
SilasX
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.

~~~
aakilfernandes
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.

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
So you think it’s coincidence these orgs are made of former high level Clinton
campaign staffers?

~~~
dariusj18
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.

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
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!

~~~
dariusj18
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.

------
zaroth
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?

~~~
giansegato
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"

------
Judson
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.

------
blhack
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.

~~~
silenussays
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.

~~~
vasachi
60k for a web page, that has a form to input about 8 numbers? With about 1000
users maximum?

~~~
silenussays
Well, apparently it wasn't enough.

~~~
vasachi
In Russia we sometimes joke, that a project can be implemented by a student
paid with food. This project reeeeeally looks like such project.

I mean honestly, probably anyone here can create this “app” in a day.

Maybe I don’t understand the complexity, but it doesn’t feel like it has any.
And if so, than no money could save it :)

------
scottlocklin
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.

[https://www.axios.com/pete-buttigieg-michael-halle-senior-
st...](https://www.axios.com/pete-buttigieg-michael-halle-senior-
staff-36f664e9-0099-4eb1-a01b-1f07cc488709.html)

------
skmurphy
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/](https://mattstoller.substack.com/) ). I
came across this [https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/airplanes-and-
accounting-...](https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/airplanes-and-accounting-
games-the) 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.

~~~
ianai
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.

------
leto_ii
_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?

~~~
DanTheManPR
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.

------
tptacek
Why is Matt Stoller credible on this topic? Is there evidence he has better
sourcing than a book he once read and a bunch of Google searches?

~~~
dmix
Just sounds like some vague connections thrown together that happens to match
the thesis of his book. Yawn.

------
blazespin
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.

~~~
elicash
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.

------
ianai
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.

~~~
Shivetya
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

------
huherto
Please consider this.

\- 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.

\- Finally, The obligatory don't ever, ever trust voting software
[https://xkcd.com/2030/](https://xkcd.com/2030/)

~~~
LukeEF
The obligatory xkcd! They should have known, right?

------
34679
Definition of conspiracy

1 : the act of conspiring together

Definition of conspire

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.

------
Proziam
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.

~~~
arcticfox
The baffling thing to me about so many conspiracy theories from Sanders' camp
is that the delay hurt Buttigieg far worse than Sanders.

Sanders is fine with no news from Iowa, the next primary is in his backyard
and he has nationwide name recognition.

Buttigieg on the other hand needs Iowa to be huge for him, and this fiasco
certainly hurt that strategy.

~~~
beeftime
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

------
leto_ii
Does anybody know why this story was flagged? :-S

------
LukeEF
I mean srsly people, has nobody read the relevant xkcd? It was all so clear:
[https://xkcd.com/2030/](https://xkcd.com/2030/)

------
silenussays
Best line: "It's not a conspiracy, it's a community".

That sure can be applied to a lot of things in this world.

~~~
rob74
When seen from the inside, it's a community. When seen from the outside, it
might look to some like a conspiracy...

