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emocratic presidential candidates have
spent the past three years driving around
Iowa, shaking hands and kissing babies,
with the hope that supporters would show up for
the Iowa Caucus. But midday on the following
day, we had no idea who won. The culprit was a
new app designed to make it easier and faster to
report results. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that
this app would fail.Caucusing is low-tech by design. Many caucuses
take place in high school gyms with attendees
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particular candidate. Undecided voters are
herded to the middle and courted by groups on all
sides. A candidate’s success is decided by the size
of their crowd at the end of the night. All the app
needed to do was communicate those numbers.
And yet, there we were.Thankfully, there was a backup system: If the app
failed, precinct captains could dial a phone
number to report the results. Unfortunately,
many said the number was busy—all night.
Perhaps the Iowa Democratic Party should have
sprung for call waiting.The cause of the app failure is unknown when I
wrote this, but it seems that it resulted from a
mixture of crashes, poor training, and inadequateThe Iowa Caucus App
Failure Was Inevitable
Dan Costa is the
Editor-in-Chief of
PCMag.com and the
Senior Vice President
of Content for Ziff
Davis. He is also the
host of the Fast
Forward podcast.COMMENTARY