Nate Silver on the Iowa Shit Show

Who Won?

Sorry, that’s not one of the things we learned.

I have no idea and apparently neither do those whose mission it is to count the votes. This is despite the fact that we should have known hours ago.

The Iowa Caucus tallies are in a total State of Confusion.

  • Richard Harpootlian, a former South Carolina Democratic chairman who volunteered for former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign in a suburban Des Moines precinct, called the caucuses “the most convoluted, distorting process I’ve ever been involved with.” “Our process ended almost an hour and a half ago. We all entered stuff on an app. So where’s the results? They’re just dragging it out,” Mr. Harpootlian said.
  • Some precinct chairs struggled to transmit caucus results, according to people familiar with the situation, both via a mobile app and by a backup telephone system.
  • There’s been some issues with the app,” said Kelcey Brackett, the chairman of the Muscatine County Democratic Party. “It’s working for some folks, not for others.”
  • “We weren’t set up for everyone to have to use the phone, it sounds like,” said Adin Mann. “I’m at home trying to get the paperwork organized all the way they want it. It’s scattered all over the room here.”

You are at home? With the paperwork? Counting votes?

Nate Silver on Iowa

Key Lessons

  1. It’s damn hard to calculate 15% of a number. That’s the threshold for determining if a candidate won any delegates.
  2. It’s so hard to calculate 15% that the Democrats needed to develop an app to do the calculation.
  3. The app was too hard to use. And bear in mind, one does have to punch in numbers correctly.
  4. It’s hard to punch in the numbers correctly when the results are scattered all over the room.
  5. Of course there is another key issue. People have to know how to use a phone.
  6. Using a phone requires a mobile app and a backup telephone system. Now that might sound easy, but I can tell you from the results, that it isn’t.

And what are the results?

I’m sorry I cannot tell you.

We need an app.

Mike “Mish” Shedlock

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wxman
wxman
4 years ago

Just biding my time until Trump starts tweeting about “shithole” states lol

dagnyg
dagnyg
4 years ago

It’s the Russian hacker and spies! It’s the Chinese virus!! It’s Donald Trump!!!
Or much more likely the Clinton machine … going for a brokered convention.

Curious-Cat
Curious-Cat
4 years ago
Reply to  dagnyg

All of the above. It’s a conspiracy!

Bam_Man
Bam_Man
4 years ago

This gets more “Hillar-ious” by the hour.

stillCJ
stillCJ
4 years ago

This is Trump’s fault! You knew that was coming didn’t you? Well it really has, courtesy of Andy Yang:

Latkes
Latkes
4 years ago
Reply to  stillCJ

Haha, this circus is getting more ridiculous by the day.

The morons will believe it.

The naive will think this is a simple case of incompetence.

WildBull
WildBull
4 years ago
Reply to  stillCJ

The Russians hacked the cell phones.

William Janes
William Janes
4 years ago

The CCP built a building in ten days, a place for patients to be bedded down. A hospital’s infrastructure is far more complex than the building. If the CCP had invested in health care in the manner that Xi Jinping had said would be done rather than more useless rail projects then Wuhan residents would not be dying at home. Listen to NPR this morning, daughter is taking care of her dying family at home. No room in Wuhan hospitals. Do not be fooled by the façade of totalitarian efficiencies.

SMF
SMF
4 years ago

It hasn’t been the first time that I’ve seen a ‘malfunction’ when the results were not to their liking.

Latkes
Latkes
4 years ago

That shitty software was developed by a company called Shadow. One of the investors – Pete Buttigieg – haha, what a corrupt shithole 🙂

From their website: “Shadow is a technology company dedicated to building power within the progressive movement.” – sounds about right. Things not working are a very progressive value.

WildBull
WildBull
4 years ago
Reply to  Latkes

It works as well as any “progressive” effort. It doesn’t. Always remember to substitute the word socialist in place of progressive. Progressive is a code word because socialist has a bad connotation with the majority of the population in the US. Exactly the same monkeys no matter what they call themselves.

Stuki
Stuki
4 years ago
Reply to  Latkes

When the two leading classes of idiots of our time (and THAT is really saying something), “progressives” AND “investors”, get together….. Well what the heck did anyone expect?

abend237-04
abend237-04
4 years ago

Sechel is right; We shouldn’t be laughing…but I am. This is the funniest thing since the pigs ate an armed burglar at the back door.

Having spent far more than my fair share of times picking up the pieces from software launches cum goat rodeos, I feel imminently qualified to speculate as to the possible cause of this one:

In the eleventh hour, because of limited test time and high failure rates, they switched to a stable, proven AGW climate modeling super computer for data gathering and prediction, assuming any results would be at least as accurate and reliable as all IPCC reports to date; They were right.

Bam_Man
Bam_Man
4 years ago

“Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”
― Joseph Stalin

davebarnes
davebarnes
4 years ago

They are waiting for their payments from Bloomberg.
Surprise! Mike wins Iowa.

Bam_Man
Bam_Man
4 years ago

Today’s lesson in “Bolshevik Vote Counting 101”.

leicestersq
leicestersq
4 years ago

The theory appears to be that Bernie won and they had to find a way to pull the result. That sounds plausible. The ‘technical issues’ explanation of the NY Times makes no sense to me, those problems would be fixed in a jiffy.

Perhaps Tulsi Gabbard did really well as well. None of the ones that they have permitted to win probably came anywhere close.

Stuki
Stuki
4 years ago
Reply to  leicestersq

None of these halfwits are sufficiently competent to tie their shoes in the morning without getting the laces wrapped around their necks and hanging themselves.

The idea that “technical problems” are unlikely, is simply laughable. You’re dealing with monkeys here. That’s being generous.

The end result is the same though: Just as is the case with other lower animals, picking the flock leader simply has to be done by more primitive mechanisms, not ones sufficiently complimecated to required higher faculties, like counting and stuff.

numike
numike
4 years ago

“One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.”
― Franz Kafka

Zardoz
Zardoz
4 years ago

trump has been a godsend to the democrats, blotting out their clumsy, manipulative, greedy antics with his veritable neutron star of stupidity and selfishness. Yet here they manage to shine through it anyway.

Our democracy is utterly fooked. It’s all over but the screaming.

I have to wonder if any of this is real, or just a rassling show with pre determined winners and scripted dis interviews. Its just all too damn stupid to have arisen naturally. The mind recoils.

mkestrel
mkestrel
4 years ago

The application “failure” is not a bug but a feature. The democrat “powers that be” did not like Bernie pulling ahead so they created this application failure narrative.

TimeToTest
TimeToTest
4 years ago

How to change the narrative 101.

Step 1 Create a problem
Step 2 Showcase the proper people
Step 3 Release real date with caveat it could be wrong

Seems about right.

Bam_Man
Bam_Man
4 years ago

This is “Idiocracy” – on bath salts.

KidHorn
KidHorn
4 years ago

Citizens should not be allowed to determine who the president is. It should be decided by a handful of democratic congressmen and women.

WildBull
WildBull
4 years ago
Reply to  KidHorn

So, you don’t believe in the Electoral College, but believe in brokered party candidates? HMMM…… Sounds a bit inconsistent.

Stuki
Stuki
4 years ago
Reply to  KidHorn

If the goal truly was to have a government representing “the people,” you’d pick them the same way all real representative samples are picked: Randomly.

As in, obtain a list of all Americans, then draw a few hundred of them at random. Every few years.

But of course, like all else, this theater is also, deep down, not about representative government. But rather about providing opportunity for a class of clueless mediocrities to preen around and pretend they are somehow useful for something. Which they, again as always, never ever really are.

George Phillies
George Phillies
4 years ago

If California were close, we would be seeing the same delay in the general election, but much longer. The actual California vote count took a considerable number of days to generate, thanks to the ‘vote anywhere’ process. You can perhaps look up how long it took to resolve some Congressional elections there. The Maine transferrable vote scheme automatically takes a long time, unless the race is not close. Look up 2018. However, the election for President in CA was not close, so it did not matter

WildBull
WildBull
4 years ago

Again, the system is being reworked to obfuscate fraud. We wouldn’t want the wrong guy to get into office, now would we.

My suggestions. Make it like it was:
Vote only on election day.
Absentee ballots only with a valid reason.
Vote only your own district.
Some kind of paper ballot for a hard (not bits in memory) record to resolve disputes.

There are good reasons for limiting the time and location of elections.

I’m really mad at my father in law. He voted Democrat in the last election. He never did that when he was alive.

Jacksondog1
Jacksondog1
4 years ago

It must have been the Russians, right?

Blurtman
Blurtman
4 years ago

Hillary in a landslide.

Casual_Observer
Casual_Observer
4 years ago

Not sure what happen but we never get election results in an accurate or timely manner anymore anyway. The margin for error is also lower when you have more candidates to choose from. The caucus seems a slow and strange way to vote. What happen to everyone getting their own vote.

Stuki
Stuki
4 years ago

It’s just part of life in The Age of Incompetence.

Along with planes falling down, inability to build enough shelters so people aren’t homeless etc. Nothing particularly surprising.

Matson
Matson
4 years ago

China builds rudementry hospital in 10 days, while DNC has four years to develop an app in leiu of simple hand crafted ballets, and they screwed it up….. And this is so they can find a leader for the rest of the country to be unshrined as the most powerful person on the planet🤔🤔

Russell J
Russell J
4 years ago

Some things should stay old school.
No one needs an app for this.
Keep it simple.

Jojo
Jojo
4 years ago
Reply to  Russell J

The California state Lottery recently replaced their good enough web app with a version developed to work best on mobile platforms (cellphones). Now it is completely user unfriendly since cellphone don’t have a tab key. The CA Lottery has awful tech and customer support!

Did they happen to have the contract for developing the Iowa Dem app by chance?

WildBull
WildBull
4 years ago
Reply to  Russell J

If you want to obfuscate results, hide them under a pile of code. This app and computer voting machines should be outlawed. There is NO way to prove that there is no tampering, or if there was tampering. Not tamper proof ever. PERIOD.

Jojo
Jojo
4 years ago

Those Iowan’s are really stupid! Everyone involved in developing and testing that app should be fired immediately. And the company that developed it should be given full publicity to “award” the quality of their work.

Latkes
Latkes
4 years ago

Elections in the US are a whole year of expensive, pointless circus.

Dr. Future
Dr. Future
4 years ago

As someone who stayed up to watch the results, I want to thank the Florida Elections Bureau for running this year’s Iowa caucus. This year supposedly was the first to have redundancies of the popular vote of both stages, to compare to each precinct’s assignment of precinct delegates (why they have to assign them down at that level and then report them, opposed to just reporting raw data, I do not know). They subsequently found “inconsistencies” between the vote totals and the precinct delegate assignments per candidate. This leads me to wonder about earlier caucuses, in which this popular vote data was not reported, if the results from them was similarly suspect, and just now is exposed publicly with the popular vote total data reported to expose such problems.

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