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Comment by elicash | Hacker News Reader

If Pete ends up winning (a significant "if" but possible), then he's the one who is most HURT by the delay in reporting.

It's not clear he'll win, I'd maybe even bet on a narrow-loss though we'll know for sure in 2 hours, but all campaigns agree was a strong showing. If not first place, likely second. His polling had him doing worse, so delays in him celebrating beating expectations are bad. And it's undisputed that this bug happened early in the process, so at a time when nobody had any idea who this would hurt/help.

(Also, the issues weren't all app-related. My understanding is that the non-tech issues related to counts took much longer to figure out.)

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> Also, the issues weren't all app-related. My understanding is that the non-tech issues related to counts took much longer to figure out.

If I understand the IDP press release, the non-tech part was really just going back to the paper records as part of verifying the nature of the tech problem, which was that the app was gathering data correctly but not including all the data in its reporting function.

Could be. I was basing that part of my comment on the statement they put out last night ("We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results"), but there could be additional info on that today.

> I was basing that part of my comment on the statement they put out last night ("We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results"),

There are three sets of results data reported through the app (first alignment, second alignment, state delegate equivalents).

Right. I had understood that statement to mean that people were reporting bad data between those three results that were contradictory. That there was an issue on the user end, too. But it's vague enough that it could just mean that the app bug was causing that inconsistency.

The detailed press release seems to indicate that the apparent discrepancy was not do to misreporting by precincts but because the app's reporting functionality didn't include all recorded data in reports. But it doesn't explicitly state that there is no other source of discrepancy, so maybe there was something else.

It may be too late for you to ever see this, but it seems there are in fact other sources of discrepancies in the counts:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/upshot/iowa-caucuses-erro...

There's also some dispute about whether satellite caucus rules are being interpreted correctly. (Currently, it's being interpreted in a way that's friendly to Sanders.)

What a complete mess.

Bottom line is that the quality of the app used in an election that could decide the president for the next 8 years was left up to high school level coding from an untested, uncontested company, with "software developers" with little to no credentials.

Oh yeah. Terrible decision-making. There shouldn't have been an app at all. And not only shouldn't it exist, it was poorly done. More details keep coming out about that:

https://twitter.com/AdrienneRoyer/status/1224796527392108545

I have bigger issues with caucuses in general and in Iowa specifically disenfranchising people from being able to vote at all, but that doesn't excuse that this was also terribly implemented.

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