Two days after the Iowa caucuses, we’re still not quite sure what happened, at least on the Democratic side.
After a glitch occurred in the app used to tabulate the votes, the results of Monday’s caucus vote were delayed while Democratic Party officials corroborated the results. As of the writing of this article, Wednesday evening, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has a slight advantage over Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primary’s popular vote (26% to 25%) with both holding 11 delegates. Elizabeth Warren trails third with five delegates and 18.3% and Joe Biden comes in fourth with no delegates and 15.9%. Only 87% of the final counts have been released.
The debacle has also fueled conspiracy theories on the American right and left, and not entirely without merit. IowaReporterApp, the app used to tally the votes electronically, was lacking in basic security and vulnerable to hacking, according to recent investigative reporting by Propublica. And according to reporting by the Associated Press, the corporation behind the app, Shadow Inc. (that’s really what it’s called, and no, you do not live in a James Bond movie), is owned by Acronym (again, not a joke), a corporation founded in 2017 by political strategist Tara McGowan, who is married to Pete Buttigieg’s campaign manager, Michael Halle. The Buttigieg campaign has also paid Acronym over $40,000 for software.
Needless to say, it will be a long time before we will really know what happened at the 2020 Iowa caucuses, but it need not have been this way. We at The Pacer think the debacle to our northwest has brought to the fore the need to abandon electronic voting systems.
Paper ballots are time-tested and lead to more trust and security within the voting system, thus making them even more important in an era where the democratic process itself is being called into question. To prevent a repeat of Iowa 2020, we need look no further than the old-fashioned ballot box.
