Yeah, democracy is fucked.
0. https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-app-shadow-a...
For the kind of malfeasance that concatenates an SQL query with user input and then shows the whole thing to the user in an error message, you don't need that.
If you want a tl;dr, though, you might consider that (a) there's a paper trail, (b) the app was always intended to be optional and some precincts weren't using it in the first place, and especially (c) caucuses are not secret votes. That last one is how different campaigns had their own estimates before the official counts started coming out in haphazard fashion. Whatever bad things one can say about the idea of caucusing in general -- and we're hearing an awful lot of bad things -- they're actually pretty damn difficult to rig.
Buttigieg overperformed polling because polling only captures people's first choices. A lot of voters whose first choice candidates didn't meet the 15% qualifying point in the first round switched allegiance to him in the second, and the net effect was that a lot of moderates ended up in his camp rather than Biden's. This end result is probably an "only in a caucus" thing, but it doesn't require nefarious intent.
Eventually you have to step back, take stock of your own experience with people, software, and their interactions, and make your own judgement. If you have no experiecne with software and people, then ask someone you trust who does. I don't see a whole lot of people who write software who are that surprised at what happened given the makeup of both the timing and the resources put into this app.
That being said, it's important to grasp what actually happened with the app rather than give in to misinformation and political apathy surrounding the news. Iowa voted by paper, so we are all just sitting tight while the hand count occurs as is traditionally done.
You can't really rig votes even with an app. Hanlon's razor probably applies here; never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity