The 2020 US presidential election might not have been rigged, but that doesn’t mean it was a model of democracy, either.
You don’t have to believe in a tentacular WEF/Democrat/Deep State conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was wholly rigged to acknowledge that the world’s leading democracy has a massive problem with its most basic function: running elections. American elections are a bizarre clusterfuck of 18th century arcana (presidential elections are “in each state on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in the month of November of the year in which they are to be appointed” because, firstly, that meant that harvest would be over and, two, it wouldn’t clash with church or market day) and technology that seems designed to be hacked or just not work at all.
Case in point: the absolute debacle of the Iowa Democratic caucuses.
The 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses have so far sidestepped the previous cycle’s problems — long waits, overcrowded precinct sites — but now, behind the scenes, the system is falling apart. And fast […]
There are response plans if the city of Des Moines suddenly loses power, say, or if the Russians hack into their computers.
But if the new app fails and everyone with a stake in the future of the American presidency suddenly floods the backup phone lines instead?
The Iowa caucuses are a microcosm of a national system that is falling apart under the strain of decades of jury-rigged fixes and an apparent inability to meaningfully reform the system for the 21st century. In fact, the Iowa caucuses owe their prominence to both demands for reform and mechanical failure.
Up until the 70s, primaries were “nonbinding public shows of support”. The rank-and-file could clap and cheer for whoever they wanted: the party bosses decided who ran (given the shafting of Bernie Sanders in 2016, it might be argued that not much has changed). That all exploded at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when popular anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy was passed over in favour of Hubert Humphrey, who hadn’t won a single primary. There were days of riots, led by student agitators.
Demand for change followed, and states were instructed to adopt reforms that opened the nominating process to more rank-and-file Democrats as well as women, minorities and young people […]
The [Iowa Democratic Party] planned to hold its state convention in May, and before that, there needed to be district conventions, county conventions and precinct caucuses. New sets of documents would need to be printed for each, and the mimeograph moved slowly, so they’d have to start early. Precinct caucuses had to be held in January to make the timeline work.
And so, Iowa became the kick-off point of the presidential election cycle.
The only problem is that, like the rest of the American electoral machinery, it’s falling apart at the seams. When party rank-and-file, spurred by the Democrats’ formidable get-out-the-vote activism, duly turned up for the caucuses, the new app supposed to tally results quickly and easily… collapsed under the strain.
Iowa’s first-in-the-nation Democratic caucuses — the result of a happy accident that has, nonetheless, created and shaped presidential candidacies for 50 years — were doomed long before a few lines of code failed on Feb. 3, 2020 […]
To help manage the new reporting requirements, the state and national parties collaborated on an app that allowed precinct leaders to report results and streamlined how the public could access them.
Des Moines Register
Instead, in a very American process, “confusion and infighting between the state and national parties” delayed the app’s development, meaning that the developer had just three months to create and test it. Instructions were not included in the training sessions leading up to the caucus: instead, precinct chairs were confronted with an arcane 34-page user manual just two weeks before Caucus Day.
At the same time, the national party headquarters demanded their own layer of security to double-check results — except the DNC’s system and the new app in Iowa used different code formats.
This is, remember, the same nation that crashed a multi-million-dollar space probe because of confusion between Imperial and metric units.
It turns out that their elections are run little better.
And they wonder why so many people suspect that they’re just rigged.
