Is there anything else to write about other than Iowa? I mean, we have an impeachment trial in progress, and Trump is apparently smearing feces all over the oval office. But this kind of failure is magnetic, so here goes.
The Iowa disaster is just a classic IT fail. Users have a process they want to automate. It is a stupid process and they would be much better off changing their process to a more standard one, buying some off-the-shelf software that works, and perhaps customizing it. But noooo, we don’t want to do that. So instead, they create bespoke software for a process that’s very hard to test: it happens once every four years so they can’t really do a pilot project, because the software would be obsolete by the time the next caucus rolls around. On paper, I’m sure they had a backup plan, but as usual, a combination of optimism and focus on the new software makes the backup plan an afterthought at best.
I feel very bad for the volunteers who staffed the caucuses and had to take the heat for this idiocy. I feel bad for the voters, who are already jumping through hoops to get to their caucus site. I refuse to have sympathy for the glory loving leadership and paid Iowa State Democratic Party staff, or the contractors who built the system.
My final thought is that this better lead to change. No more caucuses and let’s not let Iowa be first anymore. This was an unforced error, and god damn it we can’t have a lot of those in 2020. The way that you keep unforced errors from happening is making an example of those who fuck up.
I’ll mark this as an open thread.
rikyrah
Another Scott
The party said there was nothing wrong with the app.
I assume they’re telling the truth, and the problem was a lack of training, lack of “smoke testing” of the whole process, (and the needless complexity of 3 winners, etc.)
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Butter Emails
This whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. They have paper backups and other records. It’s just going to take a bit longer to tally things.
lee
I really do hope this is the death knell to Iowa being first.
Baud
Even Chuck Todd says Iowa is done.
JPL
trump tweeted that he is the winner.
Jinchi
Well, they literally have a backup plan on paper, right. They have paper ballots and I’m sure every precinct took a written tally of the final count. The backup plan doesn’t allow for instant counting, but it shouldn’t be too hard to get a legitimate result over all this.
frosty
From the title I thought you were changing the topic to this one.
theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/03/sea-level-rise-accelerating-us-coastline-scientists-warn?CMP…
Probably Not an Asshole mistermix
@Jinchi: Agreed that they had a plan. Where it broke down is that the phone bank that receives the results was understaffed and nobody could get through (from what I’ve read). Of course they didn’t want to have a fully staffed phone bank sitting around – that’s expensive.
Baud
@Jinchi:
Agreed. It sucks for the news cycle, but we’ll have results.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Great, we’re gonna spend all of 2023 in Iowa again.
Eolirin
@Baud: Given that the only reason why Iowa matters in the first place is the news cycle, that’s kind of bad for Iowa.
OzarkHillbilly
@frosty: Same here.
Baud
@Eolirin:
It’s awful for Iowa. It doesn’t mean anything for the legitimacy of the primary.
satby
Glad I watched Sanditon and went to bed early ?
Then one of the dogs switched the furnace off during the night and I slept for a full eight hours. The house was at 59° when I woke up. You really do sleep better in a cold room.
Baud
@satby:
Congrats on Pete’s apparent good showing.
low-tech cyclist
@frosty:
This is why I keep saying it’s important to win 2020 with a candidate who’s got a clue about how to win 2021.
We’re running out of time, and if we can’t pass a meaningful Green New Deal in 2021, it probably isn’t going to happen in the next several years, either.
Probably Not an Asshole mistermix
@Baud: The actual, factual legitimacy? You’re right, it doesn’t make any difference.
But the noise that Republicans are going to make about it, to sow doubt and confusion about the legitimacy? It makes a huge difference.
OzarkHillbilly
@satby:
Is this the switch on the furnace again? (was that you?) Tape it in the on position (I use good electrical tape for this stuff, it will only come off when you pull it).
OzarkHillbilly
@Probably Not an Asshole mistermix:Maybe we should sow some doubt and confusion about the legitimacy of their rigged for trump process.
satby
@Baud: honestly haven’t paid attention. He’s a good, decent, progressive guy and hasn’t deserved the slamming and misrepresenting he’s gotten around here, but people have their prejudices. I’m waiting to see who’s still in when it’s my time to vote.
Percysowner
@satby: I can’t sleep hot. In winter I drop the house to 55 for sleep. I keep it at 62 during the day. Summers are hard. I’m not home during the day, so I can keep the house at 70 at night I have a window air conditioner because it’s silly to cool the whole house when there’s just me there. I keep that at 68 and that can be warm to me.
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: yeah, I have to do that. Goofy fucking dog. Yes, it’s the second time.
BroD
#1 way of getting me to bail on a meeting: “We’re creating an app to make it sooo much easier and faster.”
Jinchi
The Republicans were going to troll the Democrats no matter what. If it had been called for Biden, the story would have been that the fix was in and Sanders was robbed. If Sanders had won and Biden tanked, it would have been that Trump’s attacks on Biden had succeeded. And if Warren or Klobuchar had won, Fox and Friends would be discussing how stern and unapproachable these women are.
OzarkHillbilly
@satby: Maybe you just have the thermostat set too high for his liking.
PsiFighter37
Also, the first act of the Iowa Democratic chair once results are reported is to resign. He just nuked his state’s own relevance for presidential primaries and caucuses.
Jinchi
I attend an annual conference that has a new app every year. It bogs down because everyone is hitting the server at the same time and it takes two days to figure out how to use it. The simplest solution would be to post a searchable pdf of the agenda, but I guess you can’t charge much for that.
satby
@Percysowner: right there with you, 68° is pretty hot to me too. I try to have a smaller carbon footprint so winter my house is set at 64-65° and summer about 76-78° just to dehumidify the air. I use ceiling and oscillating fans in whichever room I’m in and that’s normally comfortable enough for me. But it’s hard to sleep in the summer sometimes.
Woodrow/asim
This clusterfuck is a solid example of how we need to be building infrastructure.
That’s partially a top-down situation with the Party, sure. The issue, in part, is that because we’ve got literal cults of personality on the Presidential level, on top of insular/myopic local pols caving out their little fiefdoms, even if the national party had the will they’re fighting a lot of friction and intetia.
I had a lot of hope that Obama’s org would change this, but we focused, as a Party, on the power of a lot of smaller donations, and tend to ignore all the rest until, well, situations like today pop up. That is gonna leave us in a really bad shape if the RNC and Trump folx play as dirty as we know they’re eager, to do.
Got to change.
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: ??? The cats were NOT amused.
Eolirin
@Probably Not an Asshole mistermix: If the Sanders people aren’t out in force questioning the legitimacy of results that aren’t favorable to them, there isn’t much room for that kind of tactic. Iowa doesn’t have enough delegates to matter if you can’t use it to drive wedges between factions in the party. They might try it, but if the BernieBros don’t bite it should fade away very quickly.
Soprano2
So the Iowa Democrats used the same technique with their app that one of our supervisors used with a new CCTV inspection program last summer; “hey, let’s beta test how this works with our database with the live version rather than test it with the test database and see how it goes”. It’s February and they’re still trying to figure out how to get some of the information on the inspections to come into the database correctly. It put me two months behind on my job, but oh well….. Last time we had to switch they tested it for almost a year before we made the change, and everything went pretty smoothly. Every time I think I’m over my anger at him about it, something else rears its ugly head and I’m pissed all over again.
I read a tweet that said the only reason it was important to know the Iowa results last night was TV, which is true. It doesn’t matter to the actual results whether we knew them last night or this afternoon. I think Obama’s victory in Iowa in 2008 was actually bad for the process, because it encouraged all this crap. I heard this morning that the candidates spent around $50 million in Iowa the past year, which is why IMHO in spite of this clusterfuck it will be really hard to get Iowa to give up the caucuses.
satby
Everyone have a good day, off to sit in a cold, mostly empty farmers market because they refuse to revise the hours for winter. Wypipo!
Betty Cracker
@Eolirin: Some Sanders people were shrieking rigged from the rooftops yesterday, which will look mighty dumb once the results are reported if it turns out their man eeked out a narrow win. I think it’s a knee-jerk reaction in that camp. Interestingly, Biden surrogate Chris Dodd also questioned the legitimacy of the process, implying that if there were inconsistencies in the numbers that required a paper count, there could be other problems. I’m guessing Team Biden knows they tanked badly.
Baud
If things hold as projected, it does seem as if all the Iowa polling was bunk.
PhoenixRising
This software dev project had a failure point that many do: before the first line of code was written, the question ‘Why are we digitizing this process?’ wasn’t asked.
The only reason to change from dialing in results to this app was to give CNN’s producers data to make into visuals *faster*. Who was served by this app? The digital teams that have been punching numbers into an Excel template they built for Iowa many cycles ago. Literally no other end user would have seen any benefit from this project if it had functioned perfectly.
Anya
What the hell happened? I went to bed thinking Bernie, Pete, Elizebeth, Biden but it looks like it was a disaster of an epic proportion. I hope last night’s mess puts an ends this farce.
Iowa Democrats should be ashamed.
Baud
Was it the Iraqis or the Afghanis who had the purple fingers? That seemed like a nice system.
Another Scott
In lighter “news” – Android Police:
It’s a curiosity at the moment, but illustrates the ability for a determined person to “hack” information that too many people treat as gospel. Imagine the “fun” when most cars are talking to each other on 5/6G cellular networks and someone decides to do some hacking… :-/
Eternal vigilance, and all that.
Cheers,
Scott.
frosty
@Jinchi: You’ve nailed the potential trolling. I don’t think I can make it until November. OTOH, any non-political news is worse.
It’s starting to remind me of 1974 when I read the comics and threw the rest of the paper away without reading it.
Matt McIrvin
Like I said in the other thread–it doesn’t even matter who “won” except as a meaningless puff story, because delegates are proportionally allocated and close results are just ties. From a nomination perspective, the most important story here is Biden’s poor showing (and even that may not be indicative of results elsewhere, but we have what we have).
Just Chuck
@PsiFighter37: The laziest people in the world have the job of newsroom producers. They’ll be back to the Corn Belt Kowtow in four years so they don’t have to rewrite their precious narratives. Take it to the bank.
sherparick
Hopefully, this will be Trump’s peak week, because if the rest of 2020 goes like this, we are doomed. I post up probably the most important data point of this fiasco, that despite hating Trump, Democratic turnout yesterday was low. twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1224594940119875584
One reason I expect it was low has been the sustained nastiness that has been part of the campaign. And I decided not to add to it by pointing fingers. But if people don’t want an empty nomination and Trump reelected, we all need to shove our resentments and grievances down the toilet exercise solidarity with our fellow Democrats and anti-Trumpers from all parties. Otherwise apathy and defeatism is setting in, that feeling “…The War is Over, the Good Guys lost..” youtube.com/watch?v=Lin-a2lTelg
And on that cheerful note, we need to buckle up our armor and once more into the breach comrades.
Gin & Tonic
@Another Scott: So that 1969 Dodge Dart is looking pretty smart now, eh?
Mr. Mack
@sherparick: A lot of us seemed to have soiled our armor…
The Pale Scot
I wrote a paper on this shit 16 years ago, Diebold etc. The whole “well we can’t let you check our code ’cause trade secrets” is BS. NOBODY is putting a gun to someone’s head and forcing them to make a vote tabling program. I’m a believer that Anonymous’s story about fireballing the servers against a GOP hack has a truth to it, If not exactly what they claim. Rove went nuts for some reason.
Gin & Tonic
Somebody semi-reliable on Twitter reported that the Iowa Democratic Party paid $60k for the IT work. For iOS and Android front ends plus a back end. No wonder it failed.
david
Who knew last night was a referendum on Infrastructure Week?
Yeah. The clown car veered into the ditch. Wonderful. At this time in history, the latest “hope” can’t even pull off a basic lower-level state primary election. FFS, if we want incompetence on a system-wide scale, if we wanted a total collapse of whatever we have left of this “democracy”, we’d just keep whatever Hell we have now. Be better, Democrats. You’re not exactly breeding confidence among the electorate, at the moment.
Next time, buy several jars of indelible ink, some paper ballots, and start somewhere that’s not Iowa.
kindness
I don’t understand how the citizens of Iowa wouldn’t rather just vote than have a caucus. Caucus’ are and anachronism to the 1800’s.
Baud
@kindness: The citizens of Iowa like cash influxes as much as the citizens of other places.
glory b
There were reports of offering to take voters out for dinner if they switched, a fight over chairs and coin dlips.
I always thought that pressure from people you know, family members, supervisors,etc. was a problem.
Shalimar
Less than 3 weeks until the Nevada caucuses, where they will be using a similar new app. I wonder if it is made by the same company?
zhena gogolia
Adam Schiff gave a speech for the ages yesterday, and it’s been completely ignored by everyone. We deserve whatever we get.
Just One More Canuck
Great Tragically Hip reference
CarolDuhart2
@sherparick: I don’t think its the nastiness, it’s the timing. Whose idea was it to have it on a Monday night after 8 pm in February? There’s a whole lot of choke points right there. Monday-working people, school attenders-night: excludes third shift and people who have to be at work or school early and who can’t get sitters or child care. And February is winter, so snow might well be a factor as well. Frankly, I’m surprised that the attendance is as high as it was.
The method-standing in gym clusters until there’s a final tally is even worse. Not everybody can stay until the end, unlike primaries where it’s just put the ballot in the box and walk away, which takes but a minute.
Baud
@CarolDuhart2:
The highly attended 2008 Iowa caucus that Obama won was on Jan 3. Maybe that’s better because it’s right after New Year’s?
ETA: a Thursday.
sherparick
Also, because I have seen on a couple of comments, Rush Limbaugh has announced he has been diagnosed with an advanced lung cancer. Because I have had people very close to me die cancers, including lung, cancer, and seen it up close, I am not going jump up and down with joy. But all his life Limbaugh, in his anti-Government, anti-expertise resentment crusade and conspiracy mongering has had a special place for tobacco and the tobacco corporations. It is a reminder that you can have all the alternate facts you want, but in the end reality has has the last word.
From a show in 2015:
Limbaugh: “…No. You can’t. That is a myth. That has been disproven at the World Health Organization and the report was suppressed. There is no fatality whatsoever. There’s no even major sickness component associated with secondhand smoke. It may irritate you, and you may not like it, but it will not make you sick, and it will not kill you.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Firsthand smoke takes 50 years to kill people, if it does. Not everybody that smokes gets cancer. Now, it’s true that everybody who smokes dies, but so does everyone who eats carrots.”
Karma, it is a bitch.
randy khan
@Another Scott:
Google’s response to this was, at least, pretty funny. It said that it accounted for motorcycles and, IIRC, bicycles in some places, but hadn’t gotten around to wagons yet.
randy khan
@sherparick:
And even the bit about first hand smoke is a lie. A lot of smokers who get cancer get it a lot sooner than 50 years after they start (and never mind the increased risk of stroke, etc.)
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
I know this is going to sound nutso, but I couldn’t even tell whether you were being literal when you said the president [sic] was “smearing feces all over the Oval Office”. So I had to click through and check.
I mean, I didn’t think he was really doing that, but I couldn’t quite be sure.
I cannot put into words just how depressing it is that when somebody says the president is smearing shit all over his office, I can’t dismiss that as hyperbole outright.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Iraqis.
Butter Emails
@david: good news. You’re in luck as the Democrats did indeed retain paper backups
Also, as far as I know no members of the Iowa Democrats are running for President and at this point I’m going to guess they aren’t going to see jobs in a Democratic administration.
PhoenixRising
@Gin & Tonic:
Like every other software project in the history of digitizing poorly conceived processes to soothe the egos of the executives who benefit from said processes, price was not a factor in this high-profile failure. Please don’t blame the bidders for this clusterfuck for its entirely predictable outcome.
sherparick
@CarolDuhart2: It has been the first Monday of February I think for the last 44 years. The point of McElrath’s twit is that in 2008, with 3 candidates running mostly positive campaigns (Obama, Clinton, and Edwards), with the negative energy directed at George Bush and the Republicans, they had 60,000 more people turn out on a Thursday night in Iowa on 3 January 2008 (Iowa and New Hampshire & other states were playing games that year about who would be first). Not much better than a Monday night.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Baud:
Bizarrely, that very early 2008 caucus date did make it possible for me to go when I’d never been able to before. I was usually in Ames, 90 miles from where I was registered, on Tuesday nights, but on Jan 3, classes hadn’t started yet.
ETA: College kids may have been in the same situation if they were still home for the holidays and were registered to vote in their home town.
danielx
Stayed up late for results, had a bad feeling, wish I’d been wrong.
Goat rope, clusterfuck, all the above…
sherparick
@Mr. Mack: Rinse it out and rebuckle. After telling a few Iowa jokes that is.
OzarkHillbilly
@sherparick:
So have I, but for decades all I have had to say about that unreconstructed asshole is, “Fuck him.” I see no reason to change that now that he is literally getting fucked by his own hand.
So fuck him.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: India does it too. They use black ink.
Jeffro
Glad to see that this will be the last Iowa caucus, and the last time they get to go first.
I just got done lecturing my idiot RWNJ brother and dad, who seem to think that a) Iowa being a mess means that Dems will be unable to mount any sort of campaign against trumpov, and b) that Bernie’s supposed resurgence + Bloomberg’s recent polling means those will be our choices come DNC-time.
I led off with, “When what you want to happen mysteriously equals your prediction for what will happen, you might want to check the actual data, and remember that this is not a static environment”. They love it when I lecture them, really: you want to talk about some ‘triggered’ snowflakes, hoo boy! (Which of course is why I do it =)
Barbara
My first thought is the incredible irony that whoever plays a pivotal role in deciding to carry forth this “tradition” looked at the complex, and onerous rules that make it just about as difficult for voters to participate in the process as is humanly possible, and thought that all they really needed was an app to make it convenient for party officials. You are getting exactly what you deserve.
My second thought is that whoever thinks that advocating to make the process one way — whether it increases or decreases participation or rewards or penalizes organization — because it gives them positional or situational advantage is playing an undemocratic fool’s game. Iowa should have adopted a primary because it’s the right thing to do, and while I know the Democratic Party nationally has successfully pushed many states in that direction, Iowa now gets to explain why it hasn’t. And although I do realize that Sanders supporters might have seen abandoning caucuses as being targeted at him, I mostly blame the Iowa Democratic Party for putting itself first before Iowa voters and certainly the rest of us.
Still, one silver lining is that Iowa had too much influence not because it was first per se, but because it provided publicity and momentum to those who did well. As far as I am concerned, the longer it takes to count the votes, the better off we all are, considering its most salient effect will be to limit the influence of this particular caucus.
r€nato
*coughRushLimbaughHasStage4LungCancercough*
(see what I did there?)
Dorothy A. Winsor
Trump tweeted that as long as he’s president, Iowa will go first because it’s a great American tradition. I’m sure the Democratic Party appreciates his input on how they should select their candidate.
He really does think he’s the boss of us.
Gin & Tonic
@PhoenixRising: Like the old saying goes: budget, schedule, quality – pick two. Since the schedule was inflexible, that left two variables which behaved in exactly the fashion you’d expect.
r€nato
@sherparick: Rush has quite literally contributed significantly to the estrangement between myself and my mother/stepfather, though largely not over partisan politics but rather by filling their heads with anger and conspiracy theories that in turn give them a twisted outlook on the world.
Even so, I have never wished ill upon him. But I am certainly overjoyed that for once… if someone absolutely had to contract a fatal disease and be lost to us before his/her time, it’s not someone who brought others so much joy like Freddie or Bowie or Prince or Petty.
speedbumped
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.): I don’t usually click through to the comments, but in this case I did just because I needed to know if I was the only one who couldn’t be sure.
Barbara
@r€nato: I try not to wish ill on anyone because I am not enough of a non-believer to feel immune to ironic fate, but it’s hard to feel sorry for Limbaugh. One thing I am sure of is that he will get the best of whatever treatment is available so he doesn’t need my well wishes.
A Ghost To Most
Ignoring everything else, the carbon footprint of the Iowa caucus must be huge.
Primaries and mail-in ballots.
OzarkHillbilly
@Barbara: Fortunately, I don’t have that problem.
Betty Cracker
Okay, here’s some truly depressing news: Trump’s approval rating is 49% in the latest Gallup poll. That’s the highest it has ever been. I assume the increase has to do with greater polarization due to the impeachment trial, blah blah blah. But still. Maybe America really is too goddamn dumb to survive.
CliosFanboy
Limbaugh has Stage 4 cancer. GOOD!!! SOB deserves it. He’s an evil man and deserves to be in pain.
Anya
@Betty Cracker: that’s so depressing. What is wrong with people?
Immanentize
@Barbara: At least Atwater’s impending doom made him reconsider his contributions to divisive antagonism. I hope Rush uses this opportunity to do the same.
PS. The State funeral is going to be off the rails!!
Ohio Mom
I just sat down in front of my screen, and I see that Iowa was a total mess and we don’t the results yet. So I didn’t miss anything by sleeping in.
I like to think the Iowa economic development department is in something of a panic right now, they are looking at a big statewide hit if Iowa loses going first.
CaseyL
@Betty Cracker: My question about that poll is, who had previously disapproved and picked now to start approving of him? What was their reasoning?
Was it people who were “concerned” about his corruption and treason, but were simultaneously so disconnected from the news that they honestly believe the Senate non-trial means he and his Administration are innocent of the accusations?
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: That result is waaaaay out of line with most other approval polls taken during the same time period.
Immanentize
@Matt McIrvin: This. It is just one poll at a very weird time that might have been in the field this weekend?
ETA January 16-29.
Jamie
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah. Literally nothing has caused his approval rating to swing six points in either direction over a short time. This has gotta be an outlier.
frosty
@Betty Cracker: Aarggghhh. As if the other news isn’t bad enough. Time to find a new way to call Toomey a coward and make today’s call, then maybe check out for awhile.
Barbara
@Immanentize: I am going to say one thing about Atwater’s conversion, which is the same thing I would say to Sandra Day O’Connor or Jeff Flake or James Comey any of the other participants in public life who have a change of heart after they have any influence: Go fuck yourself. “Doing the right thing” doesn’t mean thinking the right thing but doing something else, it means doing what you know is right at the time when it could actually make a difference. Listening to Sandra Day O’Connor whine about polarization after being the decisive vote in the most nakedly partisan Supreme Court decision in history makes me want to vomit, on her, directly. JFC.
James E Powell
@Just Chuck:
I wouldn’t be surprised. Don’t they all send reporters to the airports the day before Thanksgiving every year?
James E Powell
If Iowa can be taken out of its prominence, so could New Hampshire. I want a future with rotating regional primaries. Maybe six of them.
r€nato
@CliosFanboy: Rush is mostly irrelevant these days thanks to Fox News and right-wing blogs and social media and how in general his appeal is limited to boomers.
But… the last 24 hours have given me the opportunity to review the long list of people upon which he spewed vile hatred and slander for profit.
Sandra Fluke. Three straight days of calling her a prostitute and a slut because she dared to believe her private health insurance should cover her contraception. Only 7ish years ago and I had forgotten about that.
Michael J. Fox. Mocked him about his Parkinson’s symptoms and claimed he was faking it. I had forgotten about that.
Eric Garner, the guy murdered by NYC cops for selling cigarettes. Rushbo made several jokes about that. I had forgotten about that as well.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He laughed about her cancer. I can’t find any transcripts but given past behavior it’s safe to assume he didn’t exactly show much sympathy for her.
Of course, comparing 13 year old Chelsea Clinton to a dog.
There’s a lot more where that came from. The guy peddled cruelty and racism and misogyny. He has literally split families apart. He has contributed significantly to the bitter partisan divide that to this day makes it difficult for family to simply get together and enjoy a holiday meal at the same table.
In some of these cases he came back later and apologized. But then he went on to do more of the same but with different people. Apologies are as meaningless as Catholic confessions when the behavior doesn’t change.
Fuck him sideways with an ebola-coated rusty chainsaw.
I’ve gone onto various conservative fora and wished Rush a long fight against his cancer… so far nobody has picked up on that backhanded well-wishing.
Immanentize
@Jamie: Gallup is now aligned with Rasmussen
Eural Joiner
@Barbara:
Read some years back that Atwater’s “conversion” (or at least the story) was complete hokem like all the rest of his career. The Bible he claimed he was reading that lead to his change of heart was still wrapped, unopened in a box in his study – it was found by a biographer who had access to his personal belongings for their work.
bemused
@Anya:
What isn’t wrong with these creatures?
Cameron
@Betty Cracker: To make your happiness complete this Tuesday morning, there’s an article in the TBT about DeSantis packing the courts with Federalist Society wingnuts. We might be hitting the trifecta here: all three branches of state government dominated by the Right. Swell. Just great.
mapaghimagsik
The cult of the app:
The App does not fail, it can only be failed.
KrackenJack
@Betty Cracker: Because America loves a winner. Sadly.
mapaghimagsik
@CliosFanboy: Its like the shit-rapture.
Immanentize
@Eural Joiner: You better have the link on that, and, even if, does it matter? Atwater publically apologized and explained himself. In Life Magazine and the New York Times. Please supply the source of your “information.”
glory b
@r€nato: I also remember that Rush seemed to believe that the more sex you had, the more birth control pills you need to take.
Immanentize
@glory b: That reeks of a theory a guy not having sex with an actual human woman might propose.
CliosFanboy
@mapaghimagsik: App is Mother, App is Father..
CliosFanboy
@Immanentize: I think “Adult” is the key phrase there.
r€nato
@glory b: even if one thinks poorly of feminism… you can set aside all his comments about “feminazis” and still find plenty of evidence that he was a raging misogynist.
At times he claimed he was simply an ‘entertainer’. No. He believed this stuff, he wasn’t merely acting. And his audience sure did take him seriously and they took his attitudes into their homes and into their daily lives.
Another Scott
@Gin & Tonic:
Obligatory, Red Barchetta (6:13)
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Scott: That’s never obligatory.
CliosFanboy
@mapaghimagsik: “the Great Flush!”
Matt McIrvin
@Immanentize: It’s not even that recent, and we have plenty of other polls covering January 16-29. We have to stop thinking of Gallup as the gold standard; they’ve been off their game for a while (and may have only been dominant in the past by default).
anarchoRex
Is there anyone, outside of Iowa, who still thinks caucuses are a good idea?
Barbara
@Immanentize: Even if his conversion was genuine there is a real question of how much we should be impressed by it. It is the cheapest form of grace imaginable, to apologize after you willingly participated in or reaped the benefits of profound wrongdoing, when it is TOO LATE to do anything about it. There are people who do try to make actual amends. I don’t think Atwater was one of them, and it is not clear to me that he ever would have “repented” were it not for his terminal cancer.
Searcher
@sherparick: I mean, Rush is 69 years old, so he has probably been smoking for more than 50 years.
Chyron HR
@anarchoRex:
According to Bernie in 2016 caucuses are more democratic than standard primaries, and since his primary virtue is his blessed constancy, I’m sure he’d still agree.
mapaghimagsik
@CliosFanboy: Maybe 10 or 15!
Citizen Alan
@Betty Cracker:
Sanders would have carried 110% of the vote had the neoliberal shills not conspired to rob him, dontcha know.
Barry
@Jinchi:
Iowa looks to be ~200 miles across. Each caucus location could have run the ballots to the nearest larger town (in vans, with candidate supporters present the whole time). Then they could have run them to the capital.
That would have taken them several hours; they’d be brought in and counted in one location, as they arrived, with candidate reps there.
That should have taken them until what? 8AM, 10 AM?
They could have run the ballots to the state
Barbara
I will say one more thing about Iowa — it’s entirely possible that prior results were similarly inconsistent, they just didn’t have the technology to show it.
sherparick
@Dorothy A. Winsor: The Republican Senate has made him King, so yes, it is “Good to be the King.” The rest of us our peasants he is waiting to use for skeet shooting.
Another Scott
Truth.
Eyes on the prizes.
Cheers,
Scott.
Barbara
@Chyron HR: Like I said, deciding what is right based on your own perceived relative advantage is a highly dubious proposition. What might have been true in a two or three candidate race isn’t necessarily true in one with 9 candidates. Advocating for a process that is less complex and lets more people vote should not depend on whether you are more or less likely to win. That’s what the other side does.
Shalimar
@Betty Cracker: His approval numbers are basically tied to the economy. If it collapses, we’re all screwed and getting Trump out of office is a silver lining amidst global disaster. If it holds up until the end of the year, turnout and getting out every possible vote matters more than ever.
I think in retrospect we will turn out to already be in a recession. Bear Stearns was mid-March 2008. the recession started in December 2007 but everyone was still confident in February. They will paper over the bad news this time as long as they can get away with it.
Barry
@Probably Not an Asshole mistermix: “Where it broke down is that the phone bank that receives the results was understaffed and nobody could get through (from what I’ve read). Of course they didn’t want to have a fully staffed phone bank sitting around – that’s expensive.”
Another way to state that is that they didn’t prepare for the planned surge day which they’d been knowing about for four years.
Feathers
@Immanentize: I don’t have a source, but I do recall reading that while Atwater did recant, he had a whole shlocky scenario about how he came to change his mind. His biographer found evidence that the BS cover story for the conversion was BS.
So he either changed his mind by reading something other than the Bible, or knew he was being a total shitehead the whole time, but before his cancer was completely unrepentant.
Exregis
Dem nominating goals:
Possibilities:
Those who do better in one demographic or another can pick the initial state(s) that favor them. Everyone can be in debates, broken up randomly, into groups of six or eight, because the two criteria are eased. After the first set of primaries (on one day), we will have fewer candidates — down from 20+ — but a greater chance of diversity. Castro doing well in NM, Harris in SC, Mayor Pete in WV, etc. Get the fucking media out of its stupid tropes.
M31
you mean the Crapture?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
trending on twitter:
Kathleen
@Baud:Not to take anything away from Obama’s Iowa campaign and his appeal, but the economy was tanking and I’m sure that fired up voters there.
Schmendrick
@Shalimar: I will be volunteering at the Nevada caucuses on February 22nd, and I was wondering the same thing. I will try to find out and report back in some future thread.
Kathleen
@PhoenixRising: You nailed it
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kathleen: he was also, IIRC, the only major candidate who had opposed the Iraq War, and he, and his campaign, had learned how to talk to a lot of rural Iowa voters by campaigning hard in downstate Illinois during his ’06 Senate campaign
Feathers
@Exregis: I think there needs to be a way to weed out vanity candidates. The most obvious to me is full financial disclosure w/at least 10 years of taxes to the DNC to be allowed into any debates. There would be some sort of standard financial disclosure, with some sort of DNC committee verifying that they had seen the real numbers.
Kathleen
@Betty Cracker: I’m starting to think this daily breathless reporting of “polling data” on Trump and Dem race is part of an effort by the political propatainment complex to keep us confused and demoralized.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
this fuckin’ guy
I was hearing a lot of “blame Perez and the DNC” on MSNBC last night, from the (unfortunately) Stoller-lite Sam Seder and Chris Hayes was nodding along. I’m not a hundred percent sure of who did what, but, for the sake of argument…
Feathers
@PhoenixRising: As someone on the twitters said, so many IT projects are about digitizing a bad process to avoid having to fix it.
BroD
So, Rush is gonna die. This is news?
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Betty Cracker: Maybe Pelosi was right when she didn’t want to push for impeachment in the first place. Endless investigations drip-drip-dripping versus a process that would result inevitability in a Trump win.
Kent
Sandra Day O’Connor deserved to have her family blown up by an IED. How many unnecessary deaths were the direct consequence of her vote? It is in the hundreds of thousands.
Eural Joiner
@Immanentize: oh, it’s no big deal – it was a while back while I was putting together a lecture on the Southern Strategy for my classes. Point being, Atwater was a salesman to the end! Interesting side note: he’s buried a few blocks from my house in the same cemetary that holds the Fabulous Moolah :)
If I get the chance (at work right now) I’ll try to dig up the info on Atwater later today
Heywood J.
Taking up a collection to buy Iowa a sad trombone….
Extra points for the precinct that “decided” a tie between Warren and Mayo Pete with a coin flip — and then a Warren delegate realized she hadn’t turned in her ballot before the, um, coin toss. Too bad, too late, the sacred quarter knows all.
When people start taking this process seriously, we’ll get a better process. Till then, it’s corn dogs and butter sculptures, and empty bromides about heartland traditions. And a bunch of white Lutherans in a high school gym deciding the future of their country with a goddamned coin toss.
Kent
Of course she was probably right politically. But it wasn’t a political decision. It was a constitutional decision and the correct one. Sometimes you have to do the right thing regardless.
Kent
Some random takes:
Eural Joiner
@Immanentize: found it (pretty easy, too!)
It’s a quote from Ed Rollins in the film “Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story” (2008) and also quoted in “American Tricksters” by William Jackson.
Hope that helps!
Another Scott
@Heywood J.:
Close elections can easily have corner cases that decide the outcome. I’m reminded of the coin-flip election in Virginia in 2017:
There have been other elections where ballots were thrown out because multiple precincts voted in one location and voting lists were messed up (putting people in the wrong precinct). Guess which party benefited – just guess…
Voting needs to be easy, transparent, and fair. Caucuses aren’t, and need to be done away with. But that’s a minor issue these days. A much bigger issue is the GOP corrupting the easy, transparent, and fair requirements.
Cheers,
Scott.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Kent: Impeachment is always a political decision.
Kathleen
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yes. I forgot about the Iraq factor.
Kent
In the sense that every action by Congress is political then yes.
In the sense that this was driven by Democratic leaders thinking this would play to their political advantage as opposed to a duty that simply could no longer be avoided, then no. I don’t think there was a single Democratic leader who really thought things were going to play out any different than they have.
Kay
@Heywood J.:
Shitting all over regular people- Democrats- not just Democrats but the most engaged Democrats in the state, seems counterproductive to me.
You don’t like the caucus. Fine. But punching down like this? I think it’s awful. These voters did nothing to deserve this level of scorn and animosity. They’re OUR goddamned voters, and unless we no longer need VOTERS I would suggest laying off them.
Iowa flipped two House seats in the midterms. These are the Democrats who voted for those people.
Jinchi
Particularly Flake, who still had power after his change of heart, but decided never to to do anything more than write an occasional scolding op-ed.
Brachiator
This has nothing to do with the failure of the app.
Heywood J.
@Another Scott:
Yep, I recall that coin flip in VA. And in the 2016 IA caucus, weren’t there seven precincts that were decided between Hillary and Bernie by coin flip, with Hillary winning six of them?
I would suggest that if you’re going to decide the outcome of an election randomly, then you might as well save the candidates time and money and effort, and just flip the coin or pull the name out of the hat right at the start. Then everyone can pack their gear and save their ad bucks for states that, you know, cast ballots and then count them.
Kathleen
@Feathers: Just had this conversation the other day. So common in many businesses. The magical technology can fix it worship is the tech version of the Sanders cult.
rp
@Comrade Scrutinizer: I think it’s fair to say that this impeachment was more of a long term political decision.
Kent
One of my best friends from college is a government and social studies teacher in Iowa and a precinct captain. He live-posted the whole night on Facebook and agrees entirely with the notion that it is broke and needs to be tossed. That it is undemocratic and results in both voter suppression and voter intimidation.
Heywood J.
@Kay:
Sorry, Kay, but I think it’s a serious process that needed a solid launch, and it pisses me off to see people take it so unseriously. No preparedness. No backup plan in case the untested app no one was trained on just happened not to work as advertised.
And randomly deciding the outcome of an election — even for dog-catcher, much less the most important job in the land — is shameful. Flipping coins and pulling names out of hats is not democratic; it’s insulting to everyone who takes the time and trouble to stay engaged in the process and outcomes, and it’s doubly insulting to all the candidates who’ve spent the last year sucking up to these people. For the flip of a coin.
I don’t care if the state in question is Iowa or California or New York or wherever — it’s shameful and it undermines what is obviously a tremendously serious undertaking. The rest of the country has to wait around for some unknowable reason for this one relatively homogenous state to decide who is going to take on Cheaty McKayfabe, in an election that will most assuredly have his tiny thumbs all over the scale. And this is what we get.
Frankly, I’m much more annoyed at Tom Perez. This is really his to own. Any random slapdick could have put this goat rodeo together. You could have picked someone with a coin toss. Hell, even I could have done it.
Kay
NYTimes weighing in with their customary giant thumb on the scale. The two biggest winners over there were always Trump and Bloomberg, and it has nothing to do with Iowa.
The fake plutocrat or the real plutocrat. Pick your poison. That’s all you’re getting.
Heywood J.
@Kent:
I’ll climb off my punching-down soapbox for a second and sincerely thank your friend for his volunteer work, for doing what he could to make a poor process run as smoothly as possible. It stinks that the process insults him and his efforts as well.
There is no reason Iowa and the country should have to put up with this nonsense. We have the technology, it is simply a matter of standardizing it across all states with a full auditing process.
Kay
@Heywood J.:
I don’t know why it’s necessary to attack ordinary people who showed up to vote for Democrats in order to oppose caucuses.
J R in WV
@Exregis:
I don’t think any of those four states are particularly “representative” of anything. South Carolina is still proud to be in the Confederacy, NV is at least in part run by casinos, WV is owned and operated by extractive industries and Iowa is a mystery wrapped in pig farms. Or perhaps pig farms wrapped in mystery.
joel hanes
Dave Weigel retweeted by hilzoy :
Barbara
@Kay:
It’s not, but the larger issue is that all that effort that goes into courting Iowa voters at state fairs and other events does not go into courting voters in other states, including swing states. I do have some reservations about bigger media states leading the way because that really puts a thumb on the scale for candidates like Bloomberg, but states like North Carolina, South Carolina or Nevada are more representative. As I said above, I hope the net effect of this is to cancel out the influence of Iowa even if it did get to go first. But it won’t bring campaign dollars back that were spent to capture enthusiasm.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@J R in WV: the trouble is, I think, that representative states tend to include large urban areas, which almost always mean more expensive media, which in turn gives an unfair advantage to the big money candidates. I’ve thought about pairing states, or grouping a few together, but it always comes back to money vs non-representative electorates.
Baud
@joel hanes:
It was never gonna happen.
Barbara
“Fairness” should have an objective component, and not be decided solely on the basis of whether someone thinks it will give him relative advantage. You can’t decide the issue of fairness solely on the basis of whether the process netted you a victory.
Barbara
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Nevada, North Carolina, even Minnesota, Oregon, Washington or Arizona are all more representative.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Sweet weeping Jeebus. Haberman’s colleague at The Times, opinion writer Elizabeth Bruenig, was busily spreading a conspiracy theory last night about Hillary’s campaign manager building the malfunctioning app. She had to walk it back this morning. Why don’t they just hire Alex Jones already?
Opportunist that I am, my hope is that this gigantic clusterfuck will eventually redound to Warren’s benefit. Looks like Biden tanked. The media is busy building a “Presumptuous Buttigieg measuring Oval Office drapes” narrative. Bernie will probably come in first, but maybe his surrogates’ hysterical behavior will scare the Biden and Pete people toward Warren. It could happen! ;-)
Zzyzx
Don’t freak out about the coin tosses. Those decide precinct level delegates and there’s an insanely high ratio of those to state delegates. The occasional toss is like the difference between someone being at 24.7% and 24.8 or so.
Barbara
@Betty Cracker: Elizabeth Bruenig is stupid. Everything I have read by her strikes me as uninformed and highly biased by her relatively privileged existence.
Miss Bianca
@satby: The Mountain Hacienda does have electric baseboard heat, but it’s so hella expensive to run that we only have it on at set times – like 6 am, before it’s time to rise. : )
So, since the main source of winter heat are the two wood stoves upstairs and down, I get very used to waking up to sub-60 degree temperatures. It does make for nice sleeping, not so nice getting up.
J R in WV
@Kent:
There is a very good reason we have rules about secret ballots. Because in the past bosses would require people to vote their way, and beat people who didn’t do just as ordered, and fire them the next day because they couldn’t make it to work for their broken bones…
Then evict them from their houses, trash their possessions, and run the whole family out of town. Sounds like a Republican Party, doesn’t it?
I don’t much care about how Iowa runs their elections, but I do believe there are certain standards all election related activities must adhere to. One is secrecy of the ballot, no one needs to know who you vote for.
Mail in ballots breach that requirement. Imagine a spouse suffering from an abusive mate — they WILL vote as the abuser requires them to vote, or suffer the severe abusive consequences and have their ballot spoiled as well.
Sorry to make that point, I know lots of people love the convenience of their mail-in ballot, but you all are in humane relationships and don’t have to worry about those who are NOT in humane relationships.
Heywood J.
@Kay:
You can see that as cultural down-punching. I see those things as indicators of not taking the process seriously. I don’t trust people that act like this is a game at the county fair.
(Then again, since county-fair games are typically rigged and/or shoddy, maybe I’m the one that has this all wrong. It’s been known to happen.)
They want the attention of being first, but not the responsibility that comes with it. Again, 95% of my annoyance here is with the sheer incompetence of Tom Perez. I honestly have no idea what he does, like day-to-day operationally.
But as a lifelong resident of the People’s Republic of California, I am pretty sick and tired of this idea that some ‘murkins are more real than others. Iowa has shown yet again that they cannot be trusted to initiate this process. There needs to be a rotation of states set up for this role.
I agree that the media circus around it is much of the problem, but until everyone cancels the Times and the networks, it is what it is, and it either gets handled competently or ineptly. They had a year or so to figure this out, and they fucked it up royally. That’s the real problem, not the butter sculptures.
joel hanes
@Gin & Tonic:
that 1969 Dodge Dart is looking pretty smart now
the slant six engine is pretty close to immortal
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Barbara: and her husband is worse. I was actually surprised to see her spreading this, maybe he got hold of her twitter password and thought it would spread further coming from her
joel hanes
@The Pale Scot:
Yes. The fix was in, just as it was in 2004. Or so they thought.
Shalimar
I’m not sure why people are pissed off at Perez. He isn’t part of the Iowa Democrstic Party. Managing state caucuses is not part of his job afaict. If it turns out he meddled in their decision-making regarding hiring the company that built the app or understaffing the phone bank, then he deserves blame. Otherwise, what was he supposed to do differently?
Heywood J.
@Betty Cracker:
Still waiting for that magical day when the Times comes out in two-ply. I don’t think anyone anticipated how craven and complicit a leading media org would become in the active destruction of their nation.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I don’t know about “mostly”, but I’d say there’s something to this. People hate and fear the idea of randomness.
Barbara
@Shalimar: Right, although he can be blamed for the debate rules, this sounds like a completely home grown problem with the Iowa Democratic Party officials.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Shalimar: one thing Bernieworld was very successful at was selling the idea of the DNC as at once all-powerful, completely incompetent, hopelessly naive and inherently malevolent. Kind of like how Republicans (and no small number of Bernistas) talked about Obama
Zzyzx
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: that’s any conspiracy theory. They have to be omnipotent but also leave out obvious clues to find.
Heywood J.
@Shalimar:
What does Perez do, anyway? I mean, I know what his counterpart does, because she’s out there flooding the zone with agitprop and making sure all the apparatchiks know their talking points for the week. Perez just seems like a diffident cat-herder.
Kent
My pick would be New Mexico to go first.
I would LOVE to see all the candidates in their wingtips tramping around the enormous Navajo reservation trying to convince skeptical Navajos that they have their best interests at heart. And then exploring the border region and spending 6 months eating Green Chili rather than deep fried butter or whatever they serve at the Iowa State Fair. New Mexico doesn’t have many African-American or Asian voters so pair with another state perhaps. But New Mexico is 10% Native American and almost 50% Hispanic. I want the national press corps to spend 6 months in Doña Maria’s Comedor eating huevos rancheros and interviewing the old Hispanic ladies about what they thought of Trump rather than the Midwestern Diner cletus safaris we have to put up with.
Kent
That is the problem. What is the purpose of having a professional DNC with a big budget and staff if they are going to just let a bunch of part time old farts run the most crucial primary in the nation as they see fit with no oversight or direction?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Heywood J.: one of them has virtually limitless funds at her disposal to organize single-minded zealots in their quest to preserve white-identitarian minority control of government. The other one has a comparatively shoe-string budget to use in an attempt to organize a disparate coalition, of which a sizable minority– maybe a fifth? I originally said a third but that’s too high– is dedicated to the idea that the real enemies are people who only agree with them on 80% of issues
J R in WV
@Heywood J.:
Technology is NOT THE ANSWER to voting security. After spending my whole career in IT, specifically software development, my considered professional opinion is that paper ballots marked at a polling station and placed into transparent plastic ballot boxes to prevent stuffing with pre-cast ballots is the only secure method to cast votes.
Any automated electronic voting system is vulnerable to attack by the designers, the builders, the owners, the communications systems, etc, etc.
Remember that Diebold, famous manufacturers of ATMs with paper trails, is equally infamous for building voting machines with NO PAPER TRAIL whatsoever? Why did they do that? Because the CEO of the Diebold company was a RWNJ who promised election wins to his Republican Party, and he knew that the first step to that goal was to design out the audit trail from day one.
That company has changed their name, but they still sell voting machines. Many companies make voting machines. I use an electronic voting machine, and it has a paper strip printed with my choices that I can see through a plastic window. The whole thing reminds me of a toy computer you can get for your kids at Christmas who are too young to know the difference.
So cheap, because cost is the only part of the bidding process that politicians can understand. Do I trust that machine? HELL NO I DON’T !!! But it is all I have. Paper ballots with bold pencil marks and an optical scanner seem like the answer to me.
ETA: Inexpensive, time honored, easy to verify totals with nothing but your eyes and a pencil to total counts.
NotMax
@J R in WV
And the software is proprietary and thus contractually not subject to scrutiny by either the state utilizing it or by independent peer review or testing.
Heywood J.
@J R in WV:
Agreed. I work in IT too, so I recognize all those problems you mention. Without a full and transparent auditing process, electronic voting is open to tampering and hacking. I would prefer paper ballots for everything as well. And a standardized process across all states. Allowing this state to use this machine and that state to use that machine is a major part of the problem.
But e-voting can be made to work. If only there were actual consequences to election tampering, but no one is ever held accountable, whether it’s hanging chads and butterfly ballots, or Diebold Hackmeister 2000 machines with Serbian software and handy backdoors.
Heywood J.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Sure. We hang together, or we hang separately.
Kent
@J R in WV: Optical scan (bubble in your choice) ballots have always worked fine. That’s what we use for mail-in ballots here in WA. And for disabled/blind etc. voters it is easy enough to build voting machines for each precinct that can print out equivalent ballots to go in the ballot box.
The other thing that low-tech solutions eliminate is the obscene long lines at polling places that are almost always the consequence of not enough machines. I remember voting in a crowded precinct in Alaska once with optical scan ballots. People were voting all over, on the floors, on their laps, on someone’s back. You walked in, got your ballot, found someplace to fill it out, dropped it in the box, and walked out. 50 or 100 people could vote at once if necessary. The only limit was how many pens were available and how fast people could get signed in. Every ballot was scanned and counted as you put it into the machine, and all the paper ballots were automatically stacked and stored securely at the bottom of the machine. This was 20 years ago.
Nothing enrages me more than to see the 5 hour lines every year out front of black precincts in the south. They do that every year by only have 2 voting machines or whatever in a big precinct. And one is always not working right.
Heywood J.
@Kent:
I like everything about this idea. I’d love for the mediots to go have a chat with the abuelas. Anything but these useless fist-shaking codgers in their haunted Stuckey’s, with their onions on their belts.
Soprano2
@kindness: One word: MONEY
Kent
Actually they didn’t start in Iowa until 1972 and that was sort of accidental. They were always around for the purpose of electing party delegates but not for the purpose of picking presidential candidates. McGovern hacked into the process to try to generate momentum and ever since we have the system we have.
WaterGirl
@J R in WV: YES YES YES!
polyorchnid octopunch
@Heywood J.: eVoting cannot be made to work. You can have a secure verifiable electronic ballot, or you can have a secret ballot, but you can’t have both.
Paper ballots don’t have this problem.