DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — A new mobile app was supposed to help Democratic officials quickly gather information from some 1,700 caucus sites throughout Iowa. Instead, it’s being blamed for delays that left the results unknown the morning after the first-in-the nation nominating contest.
Glitches with a new mobile app Monday caused confusion, and some caucus organizers were forced to call in results for the state party to record manually, introducing delays and the possibility of human error. Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price said the delays were not the result of a hack or intrusion.
The party said it expects to release data later today after manually verifying its data against paper backups.
Des Moines County Democratic Chair Tom Courtney said he heard that in precincts across his county, including his own, the mobile app was “a mess.” When precinct leaders called Democratic Party headquarters, “they weren’t answering the phones,” Courtney said.
The problems were an embarrassment for a state that has long sought to protect its prized status as the first contest in presidential primaries and the nation’s first vetter of candidates. The delay was certain to become fodder for critics who argued that the caucuses — party meetings that can be chaotic, crowded and messy — are antiquated and exclusionary.
The Iowa Democratic Party pressed forward with the new reporting system amid warnings about the possibility of hacking and glitches. Party officials said they took numerous security precautions and maintained that any errors would be easily correctable because of backups and a paper trail.
But organizers running precincts in Iowa didn’t get to test the app beforehand. Iowa party officials had said they would not be sending the new mobile app to precinct chairs for downloading until just before the caucuses to narrow the window for any interference.
Some precinct chairs said they had trouble downloading or logging into the app and didn’t use it.
The apps were barely working Monday night, according to a person involved in processing the data who requested anonymity to discuss the party’s internal system. That forced party aides to record results from the precincts via phone and enter them manually into a database. Officials were left using photos of results to validate results and ensure accuracy.
Jonathan Green, who chaired a precinct in Lone Tree, said that when he tried to put the results into the reporting app, he kept getting a confusing error message: “Unknown protocol. The address specifies a protocol (e.g., “wxyz:??”.) the browser does not recognize, so the browser cannot properly connect to the site.”
He said he ultimately gave up and tried to call in the results to the party. Like others, he was put on hold for an extended period of time. In the end, it took hours to report results from his small site, he said.
The slowdown was exacerbated by the fact that the party was for the first time attempting to report three different sets of data — an initial headcount of each candidates’ support, a count after supporters had realigned, and the state delegate winners.
“We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results,” the party said in a statement. “This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.”
President Donald Trump’s campaign quickly seized on the issue to sow doubt about the validity of the results.
“Quality control = rigged?” Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted Monday evening, adding a emoji with furrowed brows.
Richard L. Hasen, an election expert and professor at University of California, Irvine School of Law, cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the integrity of the election.
