What a total fiasco. The caucus system and its bafflingly byzantine “state delegate equivalents” was already anti-democratic, confusing, and ripe for human error. Add in an app that wasn’t properly tested and didn’t work. Plus a dash of rampant incompetence from the state Democratic leadership. The standard bumbling damage control from the national party. The trickling out of misleading results in slow motion over a period of days. Reports of massive errors and inconsistencies. Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence!
This much is clear: Bernie Sanders won the most votes, by a small but clear margin, with Pete Buttigieg in second, Elizabeth Warren in third, and Joe Biden a distant fourth. This was true on the first vote, and it was also true on the second vote after “realignment” — when Iowans in high-school gyms shuffle around switching teams, engaging in civic virtue, trading cookies, flipping coins, and so on.
Sanders is also a very slight favorite to win the the state delegate equivalents. The media initially reported that Buttigieg was on his way to winning the SDEs, a meaningless statistical abstraction that in previous years was the only metric available to the media to announce a victor (under the old system whereby the state didn’t bother to record and report the actual votes). Buttigieg claimed victory and appears to have received a polling bounce heading in to New Hampshire. But it turns out that was wrong. As more returns came in, Sanders has emerged the favorite to win the goofy SDEs. Oops!
Aside from whoever noses ahead in the “SDEs,” Sanders and Buttigieg may well end up with the exact same number of actual delegates at the national convention in any case. Again, the precise SDE measurement is meaningless.
The New York Times, meanwhile, reports that the Iowa results themselves are riddled with problems:
The results released by the Iowa Democratic Party on Wednesday were riddled with inconsistencies and other flaws. According to a New York Times analysis, 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.
Now the DNC chair, rather than go into hiding, is calling for a “recanvass,” although there’s no evidence that will fix the mess.
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
And…there’s this.
Democracy in action!