nypost.com Democrats have only themselves to blame for ridiculous Iowa caucus disaster
By Post Editorial Board
3-4 minutes
February 4, 2020 | 1:47pm
Democrats have spent the last three years fulminating about election security. And the last four months screaming about the risk that President Trump will “interfere” with the 2020 results.
Yet they couldn’t get it together to prevent their first voting in the 2020 primaries from turning into a complete disaster.
At 5 p.m. Monday, the Democratic National Committee tweeted, “For three years, we’ve been preparing for the process that officially kicks off tonight in Iowa: the Democratic presidential primary.” It linked to a Medium piece in which party chairman Tom Perez wrote, “I’m proud of the historic reforms we passed to increase transparency and accessibility, and that the power is where it belongs: with our voters.”
Then Iowans voted in their caucuses — and America waited for the results.
And waited, and waited.
The candidates eventually just declared victory (at least, most of them) and then jumped on their private charter flights to New Hampshire.
At noon the next day, America was still waiting.
It turns out Democrats actually chose an app from a company called Shadow to tabulate their Iowa results. “Shadow” — sounds so trustworthy.
Oh, and Shadow is a subsidiary of the firm Acronym — which is run by at least one veteran of the Clinton 2016 campaign, whose crack data team decided the candidate didn’t need to worry about Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania.
And, get this: Nevada reportedly hired the same crew to do the app for its caucuses on Feb. 22.
Conspiracy theories abound, with the Bernie Bros especially suspicious that the establishment just struck again: Sanders backer Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted, “Democracy dies in the darkness!”
In fact, it looks like rank incompetence: As MSNBC’s Chris Matthews put it, “The Democrats can’t even get a three-car funeral organized.”
Really, folks: You don’t need an app for that. Older tech — phones, emails — is perfectly adequate to compile and double-check the data. (By the way, one member of the Post Editorial Board served as a monitor for last year’s Ukrainian parliamentary elections — and saw their app work perfectly fine. If Ukraine can do it …)
As our own John Podhoretz noted, this mess boosts the odds for a brokered convention in July — and the ultimate electoral-data nerd, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, has the math to confirm it.
If undermining confidence in American democracy is doing Vladimir Putin’s work, then the Democratic Party should be sending the Kremlin a hefty invoice.
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