[mindgam3]

Let me get this straight. A company deeply embedded in the Democratic establishment (0) that has worked directly with Buttigieg — the candidate with close ties to Facebook aka the company undermining democracy since 2016 — managed to totally screw up, potentially undermining the campaign of Sanders, the anti-establishment candidate.

Yeah, democracy is fucked.

0. https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-app-shadow-a...

[hodgesrm]

If you are arguing a conspiracy of some kind it is probably best to rule out incompetence before moving on to active malfeasance. This is after all the same political party that managed rollout of the non-functioning Obamacare website.

[Dtrane]

If I were a good politician, I would definitely know hanlon's razor and make sure incompetence seemed plausible

[taurath]

Thats thinking in circles. If these hypothetical conspirators are so hyper-competent as to deliberately feign incompetence, there would be no evidence possible that could dissuade you, as all evidence against it would just be more evidence of a conspiracy.

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.

[ballark]

Please provide a reason why incompetence is any likelier than malfeasance.

[sokoloff]

Because incompetence is vastly more common than malfeasance?

[chipotle_coyote]

Well, there is long and detailed thread at the start of this page that begins with a comment from someone who started a different Democratic political software company and who turned down working on this app.

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.

[taurath]

If you're to sabotage the caucuses and you're writing the software that tracks it, there's a thousand far more effective ways to do so and many of them wouldn't immediately shine a spotlight on you directly.

[asdff]

Because for malfeasance you need to be smart and clever and for incompetence you need to be dumb or just tired that day and write a typo.

[boring_twenties]

For malfeasance to remain undiscovered you need to be smart and clever.

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.

[asdff]

Chances are whatever software developers are used by the rnc also work for trump or whichever Rs campaign. If you need something done, you will probably be asking your buddy what they did to do that rather than digging through the local classifieds for someone with zero connection to your personal network at all. If your boss tells you to find a dev tomorrow, you are probably just gonna text your fellow intern buddy what company their group went with and go with that to make your life easier.

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.

[matchbok]

Never let facts or reality get in the way of a good old conspiracy. Everything you just said is extremely exaggerated.

[lastpingstandin]

I'm pretty sure caucus votes are public anyway, it's not a secret ballot.

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