Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 16: The Iowa Caucuses

Episode Date: February 8, 2020

In this episode which we put together in about 6 hours @aliceavizandum, @oldmananders0n, @donoteat01 (deceased on twitter) are joined by @zachsimonsonIA to talk about the catastrophe that is the ongoing Iowa Caucuses, and are also sabotaged by the pete buttchug campaign along the way slides: https://youtu.be/MjSyYRyokPo check out Zach in the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/04/my-chaotic-infuriating-night-running-an-iowa-caucus/ some sources: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/5/21123009/acronym-tara-mcgowan-shadow-app-iowa-caucus-results https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/feb/04/what-we-know-about-shadow-acronym-and-iowa-caucuse/ https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3a8ajj/an-off-the-shelf-skeleton-project-experts-analyze-the-app-that-broke-iowa https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/us/politics/iowa-caucus-app.html  

Maybe then I move this over here, and now I alt-z, and now it's recording the correct one. Excellent. Okay. This is dumb. Anyway. Hello, and welcome to Well There's Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters, which is in and of itself also a disaster.

I'm Justin Rosniak, the person who's talking right now, currently banned from Twitter because I did nothing wrong. And yes, free Justin. You want to tell the nice listeners what you did to catch yourself a fucking perma ban from Twitter? Someone assaulted Liam's mom, and I made a joke about doing the Punic Wars to them, and Twitter banned me. Did you say that they had to, like, with a delender-est, or did you talk about salting

barfields? No, I said I would burn them to the ground and salt the earth upon which they stood. Oh, as one does, and they banned you from Twitter. So you're free. You're free of the hell sight. Yes. Sweet. Alice called Rockerly, pronouns she and her.

I am the person who is talking now. I am Liam Anderson. I am on Twitter at Old Man Anderson, pronouns are he, him. You have more followers than Justin. Yes, yes, I do. Finally, the real star of the show comes out. Yeah, I just wanted to take a moment. The reason he got banned was because I relayed a story on Twitter, which is now more than

a decade old about my mother, Ed Rick Santorum, and people got incredibly upset. People insulted me, people insulted my mother, people insulted my girlfriend, actually. And it's so funny to me that these people are such try-hards at trolling and are just like snowflakes and like the second someone actually like responds to that, they go into these weird like spasms of just delirium and they're just, they can't believe that someone disagrees with them on the Internet and I'm astounded. So yeah, unbanned, do not eat. So he has something to do as opposed to using the, well, there's your problem Twitter as

his own. Yeah, I'm going to handcuff myself to the doors of Twitter's offices like Laura Luma until we reinstate Justin's Twitter account. See, but I'm a good Jewish boy, so they'll listen to me. Laura Luma can suck it. Yeah, between us, we have that thing that Laura Luma boasted about, big tits and an Ashkenazi IQ. Split across two people.

And then we have a special guest today. Hello, guest. Hello. Must be wondering what he's got himself into. Yes. Yes, I'm very happy to be here. My name is Zach Simonson. I'm the chair of the Waplow County Democratic Party in Iowa.

We are a county of about 35,000 people, home of Radar O'Reilly and the birthplace of Tom Arnold. The county seat is a tumwa and we just had a bit of a caucus. Yeah, I heard about this. You had yourself some kind of problems in relation to some technology, right? Yes, we ran 22. I haven't heard about this. Yeah, we were.

I think a few people heard about this. It was on some of the small websites. Yeah, made like news in one half of Iowa. Yeah, it was a regional event, for sure. Let's cut to the chase, though. Zach, how did you personally rig the caucus for Pete Buttigieg? Justin just very slowly turning a lamp into his face. Well, no one was looking and so it was very easy.

I did my best and I did caucus for Bernie, but it didn't work out quite the way we expected it would. And that's none of our fault here on the ground. We had 22 county caucus meetings in each of the precincts that all went very well and reporting it turned out to be quite a catastrophe. In other places, it turns out that having the meetings was also a catastrophe, but definitely the big story is the app and the phone calls and just the nightmare that was reporting the results.

You know, I mean, that's that's the standout from like all of the stories of this is poor guys like you being on hold with the state party for, you know, three, four, five hours at a time and having them hang up on you and stuff. Oh, that was terrific. Yeah, yeah. It's speechless with rage when I saw that. Yeah, I mean, part of it was fine for me because I took time off work because I knew I was going to have shit to do.

But we had, you know, just regular people who had volunteered with no expectation of what was going to happen to chair precinct meetings and they were being called in the middle of the night or they were being yelled at over the phone. And I do feel really bad for them and that that happened to them. Yeah, I mean, it's like politics is is weird enough without inflicting it on normal people. You just try and do something nice and do your civic duty and all of a sudden you're in the middle of some problems, shall we say? Oh, for sure.

And it also like because all of these campaigns had precinct chairs who were like all of the weird people who get into politics stuff had volunteered for that. So when it came time to find people to just chair the meetings, these were like very by and large, regular people who did not want to be there. And I'm sure they're very mad at me right now that this was inflicted on them. Welcome. I thought I thought a good place to start here would be, you know, just so everyone's on the same page to ask, you know, OK, what what is a caucus?

What what does that mean? That's the town on the New Jersey line between Morristown and Trenton. That's the caucus. Say on your side of the ocean. Look, you have to give me some points for knowing literally anything I just said. No, I give you I would you no points if I got have mercy on your soul. I should get a green card out of knowing what the caucus is.

You know what, that would make this live show a lot easier. Oh, shit. No, a caucus, I guess, is supposed to be a party meeting. I was told that it's an Algonquin word if we're going to go all the way back. But it is all these people in Iowa are supposed to go to their individual precinct meeting where they divide into preference groups for presidential candidates, but they also elect precinct officers to do county party business. And back in 1976, somebody decided that this was a better way of selecting

a presidential nominee than putting ballots in a box. So you literally have a room with corners marked out for each candidate, right? Right. And when there's 11 candidates, there are a shortage of 11 corner rooms. Yeah, you've got to have a lot of corners there. Just about a circle. Yeah. Expect Frank Garrier, Daniel Liebeskin to get a lot more work in Iowa as a result of this system. Just have this beautiful sort of like no Zaha Hadid kind of room. Yeah, great.

So there's like there's like two two rounds of caucusing, right? There's like the first alignment and the second alignment and like people yell at each other to come over to their side. That's the only part I like. And it seems like there wasn't a loss of that. That's my absolute favorite part is just the absolute idea of like sending someone like me and I'll just I'll just go over to the Biden voters. And I'll be like, listen, we let Liam out of containment.

And like, yeah, it didn't seem like there was a lot of yelling. It seemed like it was all kind of fairly good humans. And that's not what I want. I want like gruesome, timidy, whole shit. Yeah, I want Thunderdome. Yeah, I want Thunderdome. But instead, it was just a bunch of sort of mild-mannered Iowans sort of shuffling from one corner to the other and being very civic and being very respectful.

Is that the vibe that you got when when you were administering this thing? That is the vibe that I got here. That's also been the vibe I've gotten from this whole kind of campaign cycle right now is that there are Democrats that have no will to fight with each other. Well, and it's really frustrating, right? Because it's supposed to be a primary election and they don't want to see people be negative at all. They don't want to see people be, you know, passionate or competitive

or anything like that. Right. And I think it happened in some places, but for the most part, our meetings were definitely low on the Iowa caucus branded passionate speechifying and shouting and standing on things. We didn't get much of that this year. The precinct that I was actually and I had to volunteer to lead a meeting for a precinct we couldn't get a chair for. And so I showed up to a elementary school gymnasium

and it was just me and one other person. And then an out of state volunteer for the Buttigieg campaign, the Biden campaign and the Sanders campaign. Jesus, so they had brought in out of state volunteers that outnumbered the participants just peering over the the shoulders of this one poor voter. Hey, friend, and she caucused for Warren in the end. I take it back. I don't feel bad anymore.

And so that was a very low passion event, especially, but even everywhere else for the most part. And one thing that also ended up being kind of a nightmare and that Biden's campaign apparently is thrown a big fit about is that they didn't train their staff for any idea what to do during the second alignment. And so when their groups weren't viable, they just kind of melted and fell apart as opposed to trying to attract people to their group.

And that seems to have been kind of a key factor in his big collapse. So this this this first alignment, second alignment thing is like voting like on preference like you have in in Europe sometimes, right? Like you you take the like the candidates who can win based on the like first round numbers. And then everybody else has to like do some horse trading and decide who they want to like realign with. Is that right? Yeah, that's right.

The coalition government of Iowa. Yeah, I hate I hate when the Christian Democrats just sweep the rat ass thanks to nothing, Angela Merkel. Right. And there's a viability threshold, which almost everywhere is 15 percent, but also isn't everywhere 15 percent. Because if you elect fewer than four delegates, the math is different because this is a horrible health system that is made to be complicated. Yeah, we talked about the caucus system a little bit

on trashy and the joke that I made there was that getting everybody together in a room to yell at each other and then vote by show of hands is a system that's so good that it's used in like two states of the US and the weird Swiss rural bits where they just all march into the town square with a horrid once a year to decide that women can't vote. That seems accurate. Who is that?

Based on these caucuses, they award something called state delegate equivalent, which I don't know what that is. I haven't been able to figure it out. Yeah, I don't. I think that that's a black box at some point in the reporting process where they feed in some numbers and then a different number comes out the end because a good at the precinct caucuses. We just elect county convention delegates and there are 99 county conventions.

And those 99 county conventions elect delegates to a state convention, but they also elect delegates to congressional district conventions and both the congressional districts and the state convention both elect national delegates. So I don't know what the state delegate equivalents are. I do. You're only like in charge of like administering parts of this process. Right. Just like so you have sort of like an electoral college running

where you have like your electing electors and then it predicts how many delegates those electors are going to choose. Right. And for the first time ever, those delegates are locked into their selection. So I don't know why they're equivalents because we should be able to know exactly how many state delegates they're going to get if we think about it, right? Because you can't change your mind. Yeah, that they should have names.

You should be able to yell at them. Right. And so I don't really know what that equation is. I do know, though, that it's designed because the delegates aren't equally distributed because you don't know how many people are going to caucus everywhere every night. So you can't say every 10 people gets a delegate or something because you don't know how many are going to show up. And so it's based on election turnout

in the last two elections, the off year gubernatorial election and the presidential election. And so and I know that they include the gubernatorial election because it's meant to lower the effect for the college towns in the urban areas where they have lower turnout in non-presidential years. Sure. And people also this is going to feed into our next question. Us idiots who don't understand any of this.

Part of the reason why it's hard to predict who's going to show up where is you don't get assigned a caucus, right? You can kind of choose to go and caucus somewhere else, right? No, no, you do have to go for your election precinct. And so like my precinct is a tumble with three and I usually vote in one building and I caucus in a different building. The exceptions are the first is that if you volunteer to be the chair for another meeting, then you can caucus at that meeting,

which is what I did, or there were these satellite caucuses. Yes, that's what I was going to ask about. Yeah. And some of those were open to anyone. Some of them were closed to only certain people. They were at different times in Wauploe County had two of those. One of them was open to anyone who pre-registered. And one of them you didn't have to pre-register for, but it was only open to UAW workers at the John Deere plant.

That's wild. Ah, that's the thing we love, a closed shop. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Hoisted by our own petard. We had a picture of one of the satellite caucuses here, right? Was this the first one, wasn't it? It was right in the tumble. We had the first satellite caucus and I was able to get to be there for that.

And that was a really neat thing because we had a lot of folks that were meatpacking plant workers. That was at the UFCW Local 230. It's poultry, right? No, it's pork. It's actually the biggest bacon producing plant in either the world or the country. I would guess the country because I bet China has a bigger one. Good Lord. Wow.

I have an extremely cringe podcast, a thing that I did in relation to this with a couple of friends in Iowa, DSA, I helped arrange to get an order of Lenin Medal off of eBay that we're trying to get to the Bernie organizers for this caucus just for standing out in the wind at 2 a.m. Trying to like organize like the hand bone department or whatever. And they did a great job because they were able to turn out 14 out of the 15 people that showed up there

were Bernie Sanders supporters. Yeah, I remember seeing the one Warren supporter in the other corner. And then when the first alignment happened, they're like, yeah, this isn't viable because you have like a 14 to one. She was just like, yeah, I'm not I'm not changing. Yeah. And that was a new future for this caucus, too, because in the past, you had to realign with a viable group. You did.

Yeah, I think I think there was maybe something where you could choose to realign with uncommitted, even if they weren't viable. I don't remember for sure. But this is the first year where you could choose to not realign at all. And that did some really horrible things to the math when it came time to figure out how many delegates people had. But like half of the caucus hadn't realigned. I like that.

I like that. I like the idea of just going down with the ship and you're done on my candidate. Yeah, that's something that speaks to me. Yeah, we considered. And I'm keeping I'm keeping one eye on the next slide here, which is going to kind of lead into this. Have we considered that the Iowa caucus process is designed to torture the concept of math in the abstract?

Yes, just to just to like punish numbers for existing. I think there's definitely some truth to that. I also think it's probably designed to just torture people who invest a lot in math. But as one of my favorite features is that when you determine for viable candidates, you round up no matter what the decimal is. So like one point one rounds up to two, which is always agony trying to explain when it gets questions. But the fact that you could you could stay with your unviable candidate

wasn't the only change after or for this year, right? After 2016, right? They they did some more stuff like more explicit logging of the first and second alignments. Right. Right. They didn't report those numbers at all in the past. And last year or four years ago, I guess, it was pretty obvious that Bernie Sanders had probably won the raw vote counts because he had won all of the really big turnout caucuses,

but he had lost by like a fraction of a percent in state delegate equivalents. And so he had lobbied hard to get that number. Those numbers released this year, and they did do that, which helps us see a little bit more clearly what happened. That's where the he leads by six thousand votes comes from, because that was from the first alignment. He was six thousand votes ahead. If this were a regular primary, he would have won quite handily.

But now we're here and we're hell. It's quite warm. It was it was wise of the campaign to to do to keep independent tallies and then just release those as soon as I I I'm trying to find a diplomatic way to phrase this as soon as rat mode was activated. It's not called rat fuckery. If it's in Iowa, it's called pig fuckery. Oh, this is a little bit of like a local local color there.

Right. That's not Halal or corn fuckery. If you're a vegetarian in Halal. Yeah. I I have a question. Yes. What's going on with this world map here? It's it's an interesting decor for that union hall. I don't know. Oh, man. Look how close Greenland is to Europe. Look, how far far away South America is from Africa.

Africa barely reaches the equator. Where's the Antarctica? It's it's just like it's a projection designed to irritate everybody who has a strong opinion about any projection. This projection bears no relation to reality whatsoever. Well, Jesus, but fitting the Warren signs underneath it, huh? I like the implication that South Africa is at the same latitude as Lake Venezuela.

Oh, sure. Why not? Yeah. What what is happening in Australasia? Why is it there? Where did Malaysia and Indonesia go? There's no Japan either. That's true. There's a land bridge from Greenland to Canada. This is a window into a different, a very different timeline. Also also missing Newfoundland. The the Corkus Hall is a liminal space.

OK, so stuff stuff gets weird in there. It's a projection where the surveyors rounded up on all. Yeah, you have like that's actually continent equivalents. Newfoundland and Japan didn't quite reach viability in the first alignment. That's what you got in 15 feet of snow. All the time will do to you. Yeah, we get we get shown red from from from Newfoundland. Just kind of like a caucusing for Greenland on his own.

Well, go and run, baby. OK, I got another picture here from a bigger caucus. That's that's a that's a good picture. Lots of lots of energy there, lots of action, very compositionally. Very good, very taken by the woman's expression on the far left there. Yeah, just I think that's how we're all feeling. That's how I feel. One thing you'll see in that picture is another thing that's new.

This time around is they passed out preference cards, which were basically ballots where you wrote who you supported. And you also wrote your name and phone number on them. And that's going to probably be helpful as they come down to the wire trying to figure out exactly who won. Yeah, I just I feel bad for various campaign staffers who are now going to have to call every Democrat in Iowa to try to bully them. Doing Twitter harassment, but over the phone.

Yeah, you just call up voters and like spoonerize their names. I would also imagine there's way more than a nonzero number of those cards that are not filled out with names on them or have wrong names or Mr. IP freely focused for Yang. I feel like I can say with a degree of confidence that the highest number of spoiled ballots with dumb shit on them will be Andrew Yang ballots. This just says math 600 times.

Just secure the bag. Speaking of math, that's why Andrew Yang didn't do well because of the math involved. Oh, it hurts not as much as reading this hurts me. But this I'm amazed Liz didn't walk this because this is the most type A personality. Whole monitor ass. You have literal worksheets.

Nobody does worksheets except for like elementary school teachers. What if we made voting as easy as paying your taxes? I love to have an if then statement on there. If this caucus elects four or more delegates, total eligible caucus attendees multiplied by point 15 equals the result. And then you round that up whatever it is. Right. And you also notice in the first alignment column

that those aren't numbers that 65 through 68 and 41 to 53 and seven dash two. Yeah, the horse racing odds. So I guess Zach, could you tell us a little bit about what the hell is going on here, if you know, because I don't. Yeah. So this is one that I pulled from New York Times article, because I didn't want to put any of my nice volunteers on blast too much. Undecidable. Yeah.

Was this the one that Pete Buttigieg's Homs guy just tweeted out with his pin on it? Not the answer. Sensor. It was a lot of work here. No, I think I think he literally just he tweeted it out. I'd like that with like his login details on it and everything redacted. Yeah, but the app didn't work anyway, so I think he was probably OK.

But yeah, what's happening here, I guess, is when you got to the first alignment, you had to count everybody. And that's where you fill in the total number of eligible attendees. Fifteen percent of that is your viability threshold. So in this case, thirty eight point one, which rounds up to thirty nine. And then you had everyone break. That's not how that works. I know.

It's how it works on caucus night, though. Iowa. That's how it works. And then so you had them break into groups and every group that had more than thirty nine was viable. You were supposed to write the exact number of people in each group, which doesn't seem to have happened here. And then where it says awarding delegates after they did the second alignment and all the non viable people

either got into a group or went home. Then you counted up how many viable group or how many people are in each viable group. And then you do these sort of chains of calculations. And it is supposed to produce a number that is the number of delegates that they get. Are we certain that this isn't a plot by like Texas Instruments? That's a long time right there. You see here, they screwed up the number of delegates

they thought they were going to elect at first. Right. It also it also has my least favorite thing, which is like the horizontal divisor symbol because it sucks. It's you have to have a line break to have like a one over everything. Yeah, yeah, that's what they should do. It should make it that much harder to use. Four times ten over two, five, four. In fact, you know what?

Get get rid of the times. It should be a parentheses. You found the only way to make this more difficult to use. I'm a big fan personally of the like all of the stuff along the bottom like having color coded forms, things of that nature. Because I love paperwork and, you know, that's the most British fucking thing I've ever heard. I love to do math. I love to retain a copy for my records.

I love to like insert the yellow form into the blue envelope and then send that one along with the pink sheets to the. You can come down in four years and chair a meeting. Oh, please. Yes. And then another really kind of fun fact is that sometimes when you get through with all of the math and you add up the number of delegates that you're supposed to distribute and you can't quite see it, it's cropped off here, I guess. That doesn't always equal the number of delegates you actually have to award.

And so there's some tie breaking scenarios that come into play then. The coin toss, where you either give an extra delegate to a certain group or take away a delegate from a group. The coin toss is the most infuriating fucking thing I've ever seen in my life. The fucking the fucking booted judge guy who turned the coin over in his hand. That was a great video. Yeah, that that will stay with me till I fucking die.

I what do you know, Pete rolled a natural 20. But it's like if you have an extra delegate to award, it's like you you give you give that delegate to the person with the second most with the second most delegates whose second digit is the highest, right? Uh-huh. What is that? I can't tell if you're joking or not anymore. It's definitely something weird like that.

I don't know exactly what it is. I think it's like whoever you had to round the least amount gets the delegate. Oh, this is horrible. Why did you do this to yourself and like volunteer to do this? No, no, no, no, no, presidents, even Bernie is this much math. Well, just straw straws out of a head pocket. And to be clear, to be clear about this, right?

This is before the app that we're talking about as the disaster. Yeah, exactly. And yes, this if this so far is with all of the John Maddening on it is working perfectly as design. Yes, exactly. And with twenty two precincts, twenty one of them got all of this exactly right in Waplow County. Jesus, one of them, they did mess up.

They had a realignment, even though all of their groups were already viable and they let people change groups, but it didn't affect the number of delegates in the end anyway. So I still give them half points. But I was still I was really impressed. They all got through this and it wasn't even the bad part. Yeah, I am amazing. So let's go to the bad part.

Let's talk about the Iowa Democratic Party's app. Yes, more like crap. All right. Did you have to find the picture of head office just designed to give us all depression? It's really sad on the inside, too. I had to work there in 2012. I had an office inside that building. I'm so I'm so sorry.

And it's right across the street from the Des Moines International Airport, which is one of those airports that's international by virtue of one international flight to Canada every day. Yeah, like we talked about. Yeah, you could you could go to Winnipeg. Still can't. The building used to be like a Long John Silver's. I don't know.

But it would make sense to have been a fast food restaurant. It has the vibe like the roof and the like siding and everything very, very strongly. Like I just picture like all of these overworked stuff as just like trying to take notes on like a fryer or something. You know, you get someone with a hammer to go up here and like hammered down this piece of flashing that's peeling up, that may be a problem in a couple of years. That's that's that's that's really bothering you, huh? Yeah. Well, you know, again, it's it's going to start leaking.

The Iowa Democratic Party is going to start leaking. That's that's a worry a couple of years from now. All right. So I guess we'll talk about the app, right? So I mean, according to New York Times, right, the app was like really like secret before the actual caucus, right? Yeah. They asked that even the name be withheld from the public, right? Right. To be fair, that's because the name's fucking embarrassing. Yes. And it was also so secret that it wasn't really made available

to all of the people who were supposed to use it on time. Of course. They told us there would be an app, but they didn't want to show it to us or let us download it too early. And then when people decided they did want to finally download it on the day of, it was too late and they had already shut down setting up new accounts. I just think just thinking about the the photo that they posted like a year ago of their staff, their team, and this bunch of like smiling, soy face millennials with their like

still with her stickers on their laptops and like just really thinking about that to keep my hate pure in this time. I'm proud of you. Thank you. That takes effort and dedication. Yeah. I just we should find that image if we can because it just like. But there's like like 90 percent of the people who needed to use this app are like 80 years old, right? Yeah, there were a lot of people who either by age or just other stuff

had no idea how to get an app. And this wasn't even something you bought on the app store. This had to. No, of course, you had to download test flight. And then it would install with a special link, a like beta version of the app that you could log in and use. To talk through a bunch of rural islands through jailbreaking iPhones, they obviously all have. Yeah, it's easy. It's fine.

Like, you know, you know, can you install this on Jitterbug? And it had two factor authentication. And the default version of that was to scan a QR code. Oh, my God. There is a real problem in the Democratic Party's national establishments, understanding of digital infrastructure, versus how most Americans actually live, isn't there? Absolutely. Yeah.

Well, they've probably never actually left Washington, D.C. except to go to New York City. Maybe Cal, maybe maybe to go to San Francisco once or twice. Arlington counts. The farthest they've been in the country is Dallas Airport. Yeah, you know, you know what they should have done? They should have contracted out all of the hardware for this to Megatronics. Yes. Yeah, we would have gotten it done right on time

and with a free samurai sword. Yes, you absolutely have to give this to the most representative tech business and incubator in suburban and rural America, a small town, irregular hours. York is not a small town. Irregular hours after markets car audio store that just also sell samurai swords. They would have had it done in two weeks and it would have been done right.

Yeah, they also paid sixty three thousand dollars for the app, which is both too much and too little for something like this. And that's where we're just going to go next. Also, to understand the Megatronics joke, please consider subscribing to our Patreon so you can listen to the bonus episode about Liam's van. Thank you. Anyway, also, please buy my van. That's why it's why I work that one in there is a little bit of marketing.

So the app is developed by a company called Shadow, right? That sounds good. Yeah, people think the app is called Shadow. The app isn't called Shadow. The app is called, I think it's just like Iowa Electoral App or something. Yeah, Iowa Reporting App. Iowa Reporting App.exe.texts underscore final IRA.exe. It's like you get it off line wire or something,

and it's like definitely not a virus and you just brick your parents' computer. I just like the idea that they're like, OK, in order to provide more transparency to the caucusing process, we're going to hire a company called Shadow. Yeah, we have brought in Ra Sal Ghul from McKenzie. So, yeah, as Zach said, they spent $63,000 for this app and the company really screwed the pooch, right? Of course, in Iowa, that would be a pig instead of a pooch, just idiomatically. Good point, yes.

It's built on top. According to Motherboard, it was built on top of a platform called React Native, which is an open source app development package released by Facebook, can be used on both Android and iOS. Well, no love for Microsoft Photos, huh? No, it's that's like one step above fucking. Do you remember Newgrounds and like Flash Games? Yes, like you log into this with your two factor authentication

and you have to like sit through a bunch of stick figures, fighting each other with swords. Oh, man, that was a lot of wasted hours by you. Hell, yeah. Oh, tell me about it. I heard unconfirmed reports. I heard somewhere that did the app have ads on it? It didn't have ads for me, but I also never got to log in. So. So according to I'm going to get this pronunciation wrong.

Casra Raj Sherry. It's got a D in there. Right. Raj. Raj Jairty. That's that's probably right. Yeah, I yeah, we apologize. We apologize. Yes. That contains default React Native metadata. And then it comes off as a very, very, very off the shelf skeleton project

plus add your own code sort of thing. You know, it's like the app was clearly done by someone following a tutorial. Right. Yeah. I can't wait until some intrepid reports and digs up the wiki how that they got this off of. Just complete with the like fucked up line art that they have. As as as Zach mentioned, of course, they distributed through test flight or test barrier, whichever one it was.

And you had to go through this big process to get it. Right. The links stopped working as of the day after the primary. So no one can really get a look at this app unless you were actively using it, which unsuspecious, right? Like I feel like a lot of what we're going to be talking about is how did they build something that simultaneously evokes both malice and incompetence? According to Twitter user at Tony on the Twitter.

That's a Mike name. I know he's a Tony, but in spiritual, spiritually, this is Mike energy. Yes. He he told me because he looked over the notes, sixty three thousand one hundred and eighty two dollars, which is what they spent on the app, isn't buying you months of development, which is what the I believe the Iowa Democratic Party told the or maybe it was the DNC told one of the news outlets. I think the New York that's like a week, maybe how long it took.

Yeah, you said that's that's six hundred and thirty man hours at central Pennsylvania prices. Oh, good. So that's my people. I'm trying to do math in my head here because and the form that we looked at, the worksheet has just fucked that part of my brain. So I said it's about seven people working ten eight hour days. Oh, thank you. That's how. Yes.

That's not a lot of work. No. Or rather, it both is and isn't. It's it's a lot of work for something that should be counting numbers off of worksheets that people send in. But it's also not a lot of work for the electoral application. It would have been a very good deal if it had worked. Yeah, for the last three.

Frugal, yeah. So yeah, further the weird distribution process that someone said it was supposed to make it more secure, which it wasn't, you know, and they're installing this app on, you know, random grandma personal phones. Right. Yeah, it's going on to Nokia Engages that somebody still has. Oh, that would be sick. I'd be jealous of this app and it was live for like a day. And I guarantee you in that time it was installed to a zoom.

Hey, the zone was good. You stand the zoom. The zoom is better than the iPod. That is objectively true. He had a radio. I'm not I'm not getting into this. I'll get into this with you. Oh, so they basically they gave this app out to

so wait, they made this really hard to access and really like opaque on the basis that, oh, well, maybe, you know, like bad actors like fucking Vladimir Putin or whoever can't get his hands on our app and then sent it to a fucking like every single Iowans who is every single Iowan caucus like precinct persons fucking zoom. Yes. Yeah. Yes.

So Vladimir Putin was supposed to was supposed to be able to hack the app store, but not your grandma's zoom. Yes, not like a weird like 60 year old man who like chairs a caucus and has like the the virtual desktop stripper on his desktop computer. Oh, I buddy or something like that. Yeah, Putin can can hack that can hack the app store, though. That's probably true, actually. Like it's too like all of the software is too obsolete and idiosyncratic.

All of the folders are just named stuff like things I need or stuff. Like every time he tries to browse, there's like an inch of actual website and the rest is just. We won the Cold War. We've done it. We've done it. Yeah. Yeah. That kind of like a boomer internet usage. Maybe that is more secure. I don't know.

Hey, Dad, what's up? And this is the Iowa Democratic Party, which when they sent me out to do some canvassing in 2016, they gave everyone video iPods in jail cases on which they had installed the app that you used to do the canvassing. And then you just had to go to McDonald's or whatever and get on the Wi-Fi and upload your canvassing results from your video iPod. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

I'm just thinking about the contrast between that and the thing I saw from a Bernie volunteer where they just posted a photo of this parking lot full of rental vans. And it was just like, hey, we're canvassing. Everybody got a van. Yeah, I was very, very covetous, as you can imagine. Yes, that seems so much more useful, like to have like a instead of a fucking like an iPod with a special app, you just get afford a condo line.

Shit, what if what if they just used a van instead of this app? You know, maybe we would be we would not be in this situation. You send the same number of vans to the parking lot outside the Iowa Democratic Party as delegates you had elected. Just all van caucus. Yeah. Yeah, there's kind of a funny joke for, I guess, political, what do you call them, field organizers in that the app that the or that the National Democratic Party has for canvassing is called van,

the voter activation network. Yes. So this shadow company was owned by another company or a nonprofit actually called Acronym, right? Air America Enterprises. Yes. Flowers, flowers by Irene, according to Vox, Acronym describes itself as a values driven organization focused on advancing progressive causes through innovative communications, advertising and organizing programs.

It is also a 501 C4 nonprofit. So donations to it don't need to be reported. Great. It's also it's also registered. It's registered address is the same as shadows. And it's in a we work in Nova, 12 minutes away from Langley. Just it's a little bit much is all I'm saying. Burned down northern Virginia. Yeah. Sorry, but the FEC filing show that Acronym's

political action, what's it called? Is is EAC stands for? It's PAC. Yeah, it's Political Action Committee. Their PAC is called PACRNM, of course. God damn it, dude. Oh, I hate that. I hate that. The one thing that has character about them and it's twee. Instead of the Thunderdome, Acronym would like to join the Punderdome. They got they got one and a half million dollars

from billionaire hedge fund guy, Seth Klarman. They got a million dollars from Michael Moritz, who's a venture capitalist. Oh, my God. Five hundred thousand dollars from Steven Spielberg. They got something from the founder of SoulCycle. Oh, my God. I was one of the founders of Uber. Just all of the dumbest people investing, invested in this. The owner was like a real enthusiastic Pete Buttigieg guy, right?

Also a former Obama staffer. I believe the Pod Save America guys are somehow involved. I never quite figured that out. Yeah, they went they went to they went to the her birthday party and then like on Twitter as recently as yesterday, we're pretending not to know her name. Oh, of course. Oh, my God. It's very, very bad.

Also, just as a parenthesis, I do want to mention and this is the thing that will get me killed in like a small aircraft accident. My favorite obvious CIA front in northern Virginia is something called the Good Food Company that someone found when I did a thread about what's an obvious front business near you. And it's the creepiest fucking thing I've ever seen. It's just like a block of northern Virginia office space with like mirrored windows, white vans.

And there's one picture of food on their website and it looks like shit. I terrifying someone, please find out what is going on with them. But they do really actually have the DC schools cafeteria contract anyway. Yeah, I that would be the most DC thing is you're just eating like CIA meatloaf. It's fine. It tastes fine. We put nothing. You don't need to know what's in it. Nothing bad. The CIA is your friend.

The CIA cannot hurt you. The only hurt foreigners. The FBI will hurt you. Sometimes both. Thanks, Colin. It's all proud. Yeah, we know that Pete Buttigieg's campaign. Butchug Pete Butchug's campaign. Yes, paid. Yes.

Paid shadow. Forty two thousand five hundred dollars for software rights and subscriptions. Supposedly, this has nothing to do with the app, of course. But they weren't the only one, although they were the most glaring. I think Klobuchar's campaign paid them. I think Bidens might have as well. Yeah, both of them paid them. These these big ticket donations or not even donations, these big invoices.

And then the like the memo or whatever is just like software or like computer. It's like, yeah, cool. I mean, with Biden, I write that off because he doesn't know what a computer is. And so he just like thinks that they, you know, that they send the ones and zeros to them and they mark them with a big stamp or something. Yeah, it's just my it's just my mom being like, oh, are you having fun playing video games with your friends? Like, no, I'm playing safe.

Are you winning, son? I'm playing safe. There is no winning, brother. Joe Biden thinks of computers. He thinks of a big like tape drive series of tape drives against a wall. There's like ticker tape coming at the end. They won't be pretty cool, though. We should bring real reals back. I agree with you on that.

I'll agree with you on that. So the app. What a beautiful app. These pictures were provided to me by Zach. Zach, could you tell us about your experience with the app? Yeah, what it was. So the left picture is some version of when my partner got on test flight to download the app.

Worked fine, I guess the app ended up on her phone. And then the middle picture is attempting to log in by entering the precinct ID number. And the third picture is an excellent image that just says, oops, something went wrong, which is very true. Big, big fan of the exclamation mark comma formatting. Oh, God. Oh, God. Wow. It's like it's like the the siding on on the roof of the headquarters.

Because once you notice it, you can't not. It's like the or or the or the world map. Yeah, I think that they fucked up the transparency on the Iowa Democratic Party logo at the top there. It just says IO. Well, see, that's cute. That's that's supposed to be cutesy. Oh, my God. Wow. Yeah, it says IO.

IO, Democratic Par. No, you know what it is? It's because this is like a whole circle here, right? Yeah. Oh, and the Iowa is is too high to be in the middle where it should be. Don't you feel foolish? This is this is the kind of thing that we truly love to see. In fairness, no one was supposed to see the oops, something went wrong page.

Oh, certainly, this is not a well done error message. And then everyone saw the oops, something went wrong page. There could be a misconfiguration in the system or a service outage. And they had both, right, by my understanding. Yes. It was impossible for me and a lot of people to ever log in to the app to report their results.

And then I guess they also had an issue with the coding so that when people put in results and then those results went into the computer, they didn't all go into the computer. Only some of them, which is why the initial results were really wrong. Fun fact that I do happen to know about this is that the back end if you do succeed in getting those numbers into it, literally just goes into a Google, essentially a Google Drive. Oh, my God, that's fantastic, which is fully controlled by shadow.

It literally is no joke. It is the same thing we use to organize the notes for Trash Future. It just goes into a big Google document spreadsheet, which only shadow has access to. Yeah, you can you can see why there's not this is not ideal. Luckily, it didn't work, so that kind of canceled itself out. Yeah, I was about to say it's a good it's a good thing it didn't work or, you know, someone would have gone in there and done something to fairy.

Yes. It just changed all the votes to Pete Buttigieg. This could have been really, really dangerous if it hadn't been so incompetent. My favorite was like when results started getting screwed up. Because they transposed a bunch of them. One column left. Oh, I saw that. Yeah. You ended up with Sanders votes going to Deval Patrick. No one actually knows who that person is.

He was a governor of Massachusetts. Massachusetts. So as we say, nobody knows who he is. Yeah, I know who he is. Yeah, well, you know, you're you're you lived in Massachusetts. None of the rest of us are unlocking some more Liam law here. Yes, it made. Sorry, I needed to chug the whole beer at once because I'm so goddamn sick of Pete Butchug.

I did not butchug the beer. I'm my dad. No, because that would be giving him giving him legitimacy. Yeah, that's what he wants. Right. Yeah. So so the app was bad. And then this is a picture that Zach sent me of the inside of the Iowa Democratic Party. Right. Right. Oh, my God, dude.

You were right. They really do need to fix that siding because they get a leak. Why don't you people have violent cabinets? Instructions unclear, filing cabinets, budget spent on apps. This is genuinely like the inside of every campaign office, though, like or yeah, committee. So, OK, here's a story about me that will get me canceled because I can say anything now because I'm banned from Twitter. In my senior year of high school, part of the government class was we had to do,

I believe, an hour of volunteer work for a political campaign, right? And it was the Virginia. I think our representative was up for election, right? And so we could go go work for the campaign, right? And so we had two options, right? The Democrats had feel goods and, you know, they, you know, that you were you were working for, like, you know, the people with the right opinions and the Republicans had free pizza.

I want to go campaign for the Republicans. Of course. And it looked exactly like this, except with a few more, a few more desk fonts. I so badly want to see like in a resolution high enough to be able to see what the sign just dimo type to the wall in the back says. I want to know what can that is on the desk next to the is that pizza?

I we've already established Democrats don't have pizza. Yes, sure. So I guess, Zach, could you could you tell us what's going on in this picture exactly? So I didn't take it. It was off of an article published somewhere, and they say that those boxes are voter registration forms and that this was a office inside of the IDP headquarters sometime Tuesday. And I don't know exactly what happened to get it in the state where things were torn up.

I can't imagine that maybe someone chose to tour those things up in a heated gamer moment points to points to cryptid involvement. I'm thinking like the same thing as the Dyatlov Pass thing. Yeah, you perversely like shred your own vote of registration forms and then run into a ravine. But I'm also open to like the possibility of Mothman involvement. Just trying to stabilize this one column of boxes here that's falling over.

Oh, that's that's uncomfortable. Yeah. I do know that when I was trying to call in results on Monday night that around 11 o'clock I was on hold and my phone rang from the IDP headquarters in Des Moines. So I answered it and there was a guy who was in a room that was so loud and that he couldn't hear me try to answer his questions. And I would he said that there were too many volunteers in the room

and that he couldn't hear me and that he couldn't go anywhere else. And he asked me to be louder. And so I was yelling and yelling in my room as people were coming into my house to drop off more packets of results. And then I asked if he could stay on the line to receive my results. And he just told me no and hung up. And in that time, my call on the other line, which was on hold, got answered. And I wasn't there for it.

So I had to start being on hold all over again. And I just imagine that this guy was in this room. But I don't know that. That's that's brutal. And I feel like this is like this is the part that's pure incompetence, right? At the state party level. Is you have this like weird rats app.

And then the rat app breaks and you just have to like have 50 people in a room screaming at each other until results happen. And the results are then wrong because everyone's screaming and no one can hear. Right. And the spreadsheet columns are right laid out in a way where you could give to Patrick all the votes. Yeah, it is very, very it's perilously close to making the the meme that I get slightly tired of that comes up every election cycle where you just put Jeb Bush with a hundred percent of the votes

over the election. That's real life now. Oh, incidentally, speaking of electoral maps, I looked at a map of the counties of Iowa, which I'm going to bully Justin to bring up on screen because it upset me badly. I need to know why your counties are laid out the way that they are. Your state has screen tearing. You need to update your video drivers. I think I might know what the answer is to the the issue you're going to raise, but I want to make sure I know.

Well, I think it's I think it's that you have to turn. You have to get into the back of the IDP offices and turn V sync off. I need I guess I need a more it's it's more visible like black and white, I guess. Yeah, yeah, but. But where the counties aren't square because they kind of jog over left. Yes, yes. That's the one it's a way you have like a print ahead alignment arrow. Yeah, it's because the earth is a globe and they tried to draw Iowa as a grid.

And so they had to correct for the curvature of the earth. By Iowa, just going zero for two on maps. And so it was bad to say because the earth is flat. So, you know, OK, but I was round. So my favorite part is that precisely 99 counties, one of which straight up in the middle there is that costs. So is two of that row of counties. But it could be two counties and you would have a hundred counties, but you don't.

You have 99 counties and one of them is just double the thing. There's one county down here, which is obvious electoral bias. There's a Clinton County somewhere, too, I think, which Bernie. Right out on the right out on the middle of the east. Only one in 2016, if I recall correctly, because he won all of the Clinton counties in the United States. Yeah. Joe Biden winning Delaware. Yeah. Yeah, I like there's a Delco here.

So Black Hawk, two to the two to the west of Delco. That's what they had the most egregiously, or at least the most loudly fucked up results, right? Yeah. Chris Schwartz, there is a county supervisor. And I used to live in Blackcock County. I went to college at the University of Northern Iowa, Go Panthers. And he's a great guy. And he just kind of loudly broadcast that his results were right

and theirs were wrong and did a good job with that. That rules. Yeah. And then Cassuth County, I do know that there were one hundred counties at one point, but no one lived in one of those two counties. And so they had to combine them for practical governing purposes. I don't think they should have. I think they should have just had a sinecure. I want to be I want to be like the the state representative

for a county with nobody in it. You still lose, but to yourself somehow. Yeah, I want that job. I don't want that person in charge. That guy's an asshole. Yeah, I hate when I campaign campaign against myself and then high school is volunteer for my opponent, because pizza. That's enough and rise.

Look, the Republican lost. I did nothing. I might my bad decision. You were more of a hindrance. Yeah. Yeah, I was a hindrance. You were a saboteur. I'm glad I had calling people. How was the pizza like? What was the pizza situation? It was mediocre, but it was the only time I ever saw a train on the.

There's this sort of there's this sort of urban branch line in Alexandria, Virginia, which goes through a park, which is weird because it's like just rails in grass and sometimes a freight train comes through. I was like, this is going to run over a kid one day. It was the only time I ever saw a train on that branch line was when I was campaigning for what's his face, Republican guy. Strange. It was worth it for the train spotting.

It's one of the last remnants of the Washington and Old Dominion Railroad, which is still in service in any way. The water. Yes. The the water, the water railroad, the W and O D. Oh, boy. Yeah, I hate that. That is it's still there to deliver paper to one of the Washington Post printing facilities. Hmm. So speaking of paper, we have this giant heap of registration forms

and we have all of the like special worksheets. And we also have all of the cards that people filled out, possibly signing them as IP freely or whatever. My question is with all of those and the time and the will and a surprising burst of competence from somewhere, can the party fix it? Like, will they ever be able to certify results? If they actually have all of those, if any of those things got lost,

if they don't fall off the back of a truck and the result is too close, then they might not be able to. If any of the like vans stop over an overpass and like accidentally a bunch of boxes go into a river, you know, that I could see that being a problem, I guess. Yeah. And one thing that I know is going to be an issue if they have to recount is that I had a heck of a time making sure that everyone knew that they had to give me all of the cards, not just the ones that were used

because the cards were numbered. And if you didn't give me all of the cards, then you couldn't say that someone didn't use one of the cards to vote and that it's missing. Ah, I see. Just throw. Yeah, that makes sense. And I would imagine other places might not have all of the cards. So I'm just trying to go through the exactly what had happened here, right? They they announced some results, but they were wrong and everyone got very mad at them.

So then they they announced patch notes for them for the election. And then people still got mad at them and people like your colleague in Black Hawk County were you just posting their results because they couldn't get on the phone and they couldn't like use the app. And then finally, they decided that they were going to like take back the votes to do quality control on the votes. Is that is that right so far?

Pretty much, yeah, they were supposed to do quality checks and that there was a big promise of quality checks at every step. But then they kept releasing results that were wrong. So yeah, I don't think of quality assurances being something that you need a lot of for a vote. But like it you just look at the number. You don't have to like interrogate how finely rounded the number is, right? But I I don't know.

I I guess they need more time to like polish and like it's a it's a when it's done kind of election. Yeah. And I mean, I guess they did probably have to do some of the math, right? Because they had to check and make sure the math was done correctly as part of the quality checks. I'm assuming hopefully at some point, somebody checks the math. Yeah, and it doesn't introduce another bunch of like specious errors. And we find out that Marianne Williamson somehow got, you know, 90 percent of the vote, right? So he said Mary in there and I immediately my mind shot to Mary and Barry. Same. I was like, that would that would be pretty funny.

Mary and Barry wins Iowa inexplicably. RIP. Yeah. RIP to a real one. Yes. So, right, yeah. And it was like what today they announced that like, OK, we're going to extend the deadline for complaining about problems to Monday. Yeah. And Tom Perez, the DNC chairman,

said that they were going to reassess the votes. People got very mad at him. So then he said that that doesn't mean that they were going to recount the votes, just like look at them while quizzically scratching their heads and holding the paper at a slightly different angle. And then the IDP got very mad at him and said that he didn't even have standing to make them do that and they didn't want to. This I I don't say it's basically like you may as well have cancelled the election

because the purpose of it in terms of like determining momentum or whatever politically is just now gone. It's it's just now it's just contested, right? I that's probably pretty fair, right, because only it's worse because there are people who are able to say that they won that didn't win. And then there are people who did win that. I can't say that they won. Yes, it's rat rat rat problems.

And they all spent tons and tons of money. Yeah. So it was like some kind of producers type gambit, maybe to just take all of their campaign money. Yeah. So this was this was an incredibly expensive way of essentially cancelling an election and all it cost was the sixty thousand dollars for the app and the legitimacy of Iowa and public democracy. That doesn't seem like a great deal to me. Maybe I don't know. Yeah.

And I think you can talk about incompetence for sure with the state party, but I'm a little skeptical of the the conspiracy theory part of it just because you're talking about a state party that has been laser focused on keeping Iowa first at the expense of almost every other issue. And so I can't really imagine that they would deliberately mess up so badly. But you can definitely talk about whether they were taken advantage of or just massively incompetent. And those are fair points to me.

That never attribute to malice, what can adequately be explained by incompetence. So with that in mind, I'm trying to think what other states have caucuses because that in Wyoming. OK, I remember Nevada being a lot of horse trading with like hotel unions and stuff, so that's going to be fun. Yeah. Yeah. But next, we have New Hampshire, right? And that's just like an actual primary

that people just put across in a ballot paper and like put that in a box. And then they count the number of things in the box, right? Bernie's going to win. Except in Dixiel Notch, where everybody shows up at midnight and votes and then their votes are immediately opened. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about Inzmouth here. It's not going to be normal, whatever happens. But like relatively speaking, on a procedural level,

it's more it's more rat proof. Right, this is part of the episode where my audio cut out because my computer crashed because I assume I flew too close to the sun and people to judge took it out. So I'm going to skip directly to the commercials that everyone did. And we're going to, you know, we also did the Tacoma-Narrows Bridge joke, which is usual. And I also want to say, look, I haven't watched the debates,

but Bernie is going to crush New Hampshire. I assume in the debates, he like, I don't know, killed Andrew Yang with a mech suit in a show of force, which I assume is going to be very good for him going forward. So anyway, this is the end of the podcast. Or in a few minutes, it will be OK. Listen to Trash Future. We just did an episode about sort of the macro thing of this,

where we weren't talking so much about the app and what happened, but about the Democratic Party's weird class of consultants and data freaks and how they they engineered this in the metaphorical rather than literal sense. I guess I'll go next. Lea Anderson, continue, please, to subscribe to the Patreon through these trying times, considering do not eat, got his ass canceled in defense of my mother,

who I don't appreciate, said thanks, buddy. And we are all carrying a big picture of Justin and we are chanting Yasha Heads. Yeah. And I'm Zach Simonson, I.A. on Twitter, and we are the Waplow County Democrats on Act Blue. I think it's W.C.D.C.C. Waplow County Democrats Central Committee, very Soviet on Act Blue. If you want to chip in a couple of bucks for the people who got the caucus right,

we'd really appreciate it. Absolutely do that. Yeah. Bye, everybody. Cheers. Bye.