(The Center Square) — Iowa has coveted its status as the state where political parties stage their first presidential nominating contests every four years since 1972, serving as an intensely watched and analyzed litmus test for the nationwide viability of candidates’ campaigns.
But with that outsized attention on Iowa’s primary caucuses comes pressure and scrutiny from national interests and media — as well as criticism, particularly among Democrats, that the state’s demographics are not representative of the country and should not play such a seminal role in selecting party standard-bearers.
Those factors and failures by the state Democratic party contributed to the chaotic Feb. 3 Iowa Democratic Caucuses, but intervention and meddling by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was the main culprit, according to an audit by the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) State Central Committee.
The 26-page report, assembled by independent attorneys led by former Iowa Attorney General Bonnie Campbell, identifies errors made by the DNC, IDP and the technology company, Shadow, which the state party hired to build a reporting app to collect caucus results.
After caucuses adjourned Feb. 3, the IDP was unable to report who won the 12-candidate primary until Feb. 6 when it declared Pete Buttigieg the winner by two state delegates over Bernie Sanders, who won the popular vote. In the wake of the chaos, IDP Chair Troy Price resigned
On caucus night, only 439 of 1,765 precincts successfully submitted results through Shadow’s mobile app, back-up telephone systems were jammed and some reported inaccurate results, according to the report.
The delays in reporting results did not stem from problems with Shadow’s reporting app, the report states, but from issues created by the DNC’s intervention.
According to the report, the DNC “aggressively interjected itself in all of the IDP’s technology endeavors” in the name of cybersecurity, belaboring development of a mobile app to report caucus results with a state-hired contractor, Shadow.
The DNC required Shadow to provide security assurances and perform security exercises.
“Shadow believed these interjections were unnecessary, unhelpful, time-consuming, and the cause of further development delays,” the report states, noting the app was delivered less than two weeks before the caucuses.
“Due to the significant delay, users of the app weren’t trained properly and on the night of the voting, users either opted not to use the app or gave up partway through after encountering bugs,” the report recounts.
The DNC demanded Shadow build a “conversion tool” just weeks before the caucuses to provide real-time access to raw numbers, despite using a different data base than the mobile app.
“Attempting to graft an entirely new software element onto the back-end reporting system at the proverbial eleventh hour is likely always going to be problematic, and it was ultimately the cause of a major problem on caucus night,” the report states. “Furthermore, the IDP was not involved in the development of this tool. The IDP simply permitted the DNC to direct the IDP’s vendor.”
The audit states the conversion tool had coding errors that spit out inaccurate numbers and caused confusion about the accuracy of the results, eventually leading to delays in reporting.
The DNC refused to participate in the audit.
“Evaluating the nominating process always happens following the election so that DNC staff can remain focused on winning the general election — and this cycle that work helped contribute to President-Elect Biden’s historic victory,” DNC spokesman David Bergstein said in a statement.
