The New York Times reported Thursday that the Iowa caucus was “riddled with errors” and that the Iowa Democrats presided over a “systemwide disaster” that amounted to a complete “meltdown,” but Iowa Democrats believe there’s a better excuse for what happened in their caucus Monday night: sabotage by supporters of President Donald Trump.
The application used in the Iowa Democratic caucuses is now the well-known top culprit in Monday night’s debacle. Meant to help caucus organizers tabulate, process, and report data, the $60,000 system failed miserably, even though Iowa has just over 1,800 individual precincts, giving the application a minimal amount of data to handle. In many cases, the app didn’t allow organizers to input data; in others, it botched the tabulation process. Some organizers, it now appears, were never able to log in to the app at all.
The New York Times, though, reported Thursday that, even without the app, “more than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, that were missing data or that were not possible under the complex rules of the Iowa caucuses.”
“In some cases, vote tallies do not add up. In others, precincts are shown allotting the wrong number of delegates to certain candidates. And in at least a few cases, the Iowa Democratic Party’s reported results do not match those reported by the precincts,” the paper claimed — and that’s after the so-called “quality control checks” the party put in place Monday night.
The situation is so bad that Democratic National Commitee chairman Tom Perez begged the Iowa Democratic party for a “complete recanvass” in a tweet issued Thursday morning.
Enough is enough. In light of the problems that have emerged in the implementation of the delegate selection plan and in order to assure public confidence in the results, I am calling on the Iowa Democratic Party to immediately begin a recanvass.
— Tom Perez (@TomPerez) February 6, 2020
“Enough is enough,” Perez said on social media. “In light of the problems that have emerged in the implementation of the delegate selection plan and in order to assure public confidence in the results, I am calling on the Iowa Democratic Party to immediately begin a recanvass.”
In a conference call with supporters Wednesday night, though, Iowa Democrats pointed the finger at Trump supporters, not themselves, claiming that the helpline, designed to assist caucus organizers in reporting their results via the app, was overloaded with prank phone calls thanks to a group of internet trolls, hamstringing the whole process.
“Ken Sagar, a Democratic central committee member in the state, told a conference call Wednesday that on the night of the caucus, Trump backers were calling in to voice their support for the president, Bloomberg reported. Sagar was reportedly one of the people answering the calls,” Fox News reported.
Although only two others substantiated Sagar’s report, NBC News ran with it as gospel, claiming that a “clog the lines” effort, organized by the notorious 4chan, was responsible for the chaos.
“The phone number to report Iowa caucus results was posted on a fringe internet message board on Monday night along with encouragement to ‘clog the lines,'” NBC News reported, “an indication that jammed phone lines that left some caucus managers on hold for hours may have in part been due to prank calls.”
‘An Iowa Democratic Party official said the influx of calls to the reporting hotline included ‘supporters of President Trump who called to express their displeasure with the Democratic Party.'”
Indeed, it does appear that 4chan organized a call-in effort, but it seems, per the posts instigating the effort, that they only came up with the idea after it was clear the application was in meltdown.
“Uh oh how unfortunate it would be for a bunch of mischief makers to start clogging the lines,” one user said.
Volunteers also told NBC News that they were able to screen out the prank callers pretty quickly, moving on to more important issues: “If I picked up the phone and it was clear after the first handful of words that someone was not calling to report the results, I just hung up,” one man in charge of handling help calls told the network.