The article mentions the paper trail backup. Good luck with that. Given our experience with Florida in the 2000 presidential election, who would be willing to bet that the paper ballot results would agree with the head count results? I was at one of the caucuses - there were two paper ballot rounds and three head counts (done by people counting themselves, supervised by staffers for the various candidates). 626 people attended my caucus. I'm sure none of them were in the bathroom during one of the three head counts over the course of a couple hours; that just couldn't happen.<p>The paper ballots required attendees to fill in the full name of their preferred candidate (plus a second choice), as well as their own name and address. Considering the fact that people cannot be counted on to fill in a circle or punch a hole in a piece of paper with 100% accuracy, how likely is it that multiple lines of text can be written on a card correctly and legibly?. If they actually fall back on the paper ballots, I predict all hope of a clear result will be lost.
Based on the linkedin profiles of people who work at the company that made this app it doesn't look like there was a single senior engineer involved.<p>EDIT: the CTO actually has a lot of experience, I didn't see her first two positions at SRI and Google because linkedin folded it.
Why on earth did they make an app which they didn't even have time to get approved? This could have been done easily with a website. Honestly, they could have used Google Forms. A secure, off the shelf, and much cheaper option would have be to setup a G Suite workplace, mail security tokens to the caucus leaders, have them make accounts on a computer, and submit the results through a form.
Why do you need anything beyond a stack of Excel spreadsheets? The polling locations call in the tally to the town, the town calls in results to the county, and the county forwards the results to the state, to be certified. Like this you get the final result two hours after polls close. Everything else is needless complexity.
Iowa's caucus has been more or less working fine since it started in 1972.<p>What was the value add of introducing an app? Knowing results sooner? Certainly not simplicity or reliability.<p>I'm reminded of an xkcd comic (I think) where the fight to eradicate some disease is essentially making stead,y predictable progress, and a room full of developers is ready to chuck the whole process in favor of app-ification. This is that.
Why don’t they have an actual primary instead of that quaint barndance of a caucus?<p>Every state should have a primary on the same day instead of giving states like Iowa and New Hampshire outsized influence on the media narrative.