[sailfast]

The interface was the confusing part, not the responsiveness. Caucus precinct chiefs skew older, the app was not part of their training, and they waited until the last minute to download.

This doesn’t really seem like something to pin on the app exclusively - it’s a change management failure on the part of the party, underlined by the fact that even their normal phone lines were overloaded due to new data reporting requirements.

I wasn’t on the ground or anything (I’m a complete outsider who read the news) but this seems like a lot to pin on some app developers when the issues were spread pretty far. It’s damnably hard to train 1800 users spread across a state with varying levels of experience.

[couchand]

> normal phone lines were overloaded due to new data reporting requirements.

I suspect their phone lines were overloaded because they optimistically assumed the app would handle the majority of the reporting. When Plan A failed, there was a knock-on effect on Plan B, causing it to subsequently fail.

[sailfast]

Correction: as more info comes in, it looks like there were also actual bugs in the software that were tallying things improperly. Change management is still hard but baseline stuff seemed to be a problem.

[inkeddeveloper]

I blame the app developers for pitching such an idea in the first place.

[sailfast]

Yeah... after more news has come out it looks like this was quite buggy. Not to mention they had two months to build it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/us/politics/iowa-caucus-s...