Technological flop and suspicions, the crazy night of the liberal: “We made a disaster”

Never before has the famous joke by comedian Will Rogers seemed current: “I don’t belong to any organized political party, I’m a Democrat.” The problem however is that the chaos that erupted in the first vote of the race in the White House is undermining the credibility of the entire system, between the obvious incompetence of those who managed it, the fear of cyber attacks, the suspicion of fraud, and the demonstration practice how obsolete the mechanism by which Americans choose the “leader of the free world”.

The feeling that something went wrong begins to surface around nine in the evening, when executives do not publish the first results of the caucus as promised. I followed them to the Jefferson Elementary School gym, at 2425 Watrous Avenue, and everything seemed smooth. The first “alignment” rewarded Biden and Buttigieg, and the second confirms the trend, not exactly aligned with that of the rest of the state. Ben, the head of the seat, seems satisfied with the process: “Biden is ahead for his experience, Buttigieg for the passion generated by his novelty”. I go out, with no idea of ​​the storm coming.

At 10.26 the first communiqué from Troy Price, president of the Democratic Party of Iowa, admits problems: “We are doing a quality check on the votes, there are inconsistencies”. In Sanders headquarters, the nervousness rises at the Holiday Inn in front of the airport. Brad Parscale, manager of the campaign for the re-election of Trump, takes advantage of this to turn the knife in the scourge of 2016: “Quality control equal to fraud?”. He insinuates that the party wants to cheat Bernie, too left to win in November, as he did four years ago helping Hillary. Then he adds: «If they can’t even manage a caucus, how can they govern the country? No thanks”.

Shortly after Sanders breaks the delay, and presents himself in front of his supporters: “I suppose sooner or later we will have the results, but we are still ahead”. In fact, his campaign publishes the internal counts, based on data received from 40% of the seats. Bernie is ahead with 28.62%, followed by Buttigieg with 25.71%, and Warren with 18.42%. Biden is detached in fourth place, 15.08%. Then he too speaks, to diminish the disappointment: “We leave Iowa with our portion of delegates, under New Hampshire”. It went wrong, and it is clear from the letter that his lawyers send to the party leaders: “There are serious doubts about the integrity of the process, do not publish the data until they are confirmed”. Klobuchar claims to have gone better than expected, while Warren will say that it is a three game between her, Biden and Buttigieg. peyou he is the last to go on stage, but he gives a speech by a mattatore: “Iowa shocked the country. Anyway it will end, I go to New Hampshire victorious ».

At around one in the morning Price contacts the campaigns and informs them that the results will not be published before the next day. The general explanation is that the application used to transmit the data did not work, reporting only partial counts. So it will be necessary to redo everything by hand and by telephone, in the 21st century. Price rules out external cyber attacks, such as the Russian ones in 2016, but what really happened? In 2019, he paid $ 63,000 to Shadow Inc to develop the application. This start-up was founded by Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, already involved in the Hillary Clinton campaign, and belongs to the non-profit Acronym led by Tara McGowan, in Obama’s electoral staff in 2012. In addition, the rumor spread that the deputy Buttigieg’s communications director worked the company involved. They are all enemies of Sanders, and therefore the conspiracy theory is strengthened, while the Homeland Security department reveals that Shadow has refused his help to verify the security of the application. Chaos is therefore the fault of the Democrats, but it also confirms a fact that is increasingly discussed in the United States. The electoral system thus conceived, with the caucuses, the initial primaries distributed without a true criterion between irrelevant states, and the same mechanism of the electoral college for the conquest of the white house, is obsolete. And it undermines the credibility of the democratic process. –

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