The Iowa caucuses were a comedy of tech errors and poor planning

Enlarge / The Iowa Democratic Party caucus app displayed on an iPhone outside Iowa Democratic Party headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa, on Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The disastrous Iowa Democratic caucuses were hampered by a mix of tech problems and poor planning, a New York Times report published yesterday shows.

From a malfunctioning smartphone app to a barely staffed IT help desk and a key party official not knowing how to use a Google spreadsheet, plenty of problems turned the process of calculating and reporting caucus results into a laughingstock. While most of the problems were self-inflicted, the state party also suffered from jammed phone lines after 4chan users "publicly posted the election hotline number and encouraged one another to 'clog the lines.'"

As we noted in coverage last week, the smartphone app used for reporting results "repeatedly hung as precinct leaders attempted to submit returns."

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