Snigger

These are all the clever people who want to run the country, right? Are going to sort out healthcare, inequality, with central government plans?

Iowa caucus results: what we know so far
Democratic presidential primary contest descends into chaos in midwestern state

26 thoughts on “Snigger”

  3. decnine

    Feels a lot as if the wrong candidate won, and by too big a margin for the usual chicanery to deal with. The Dems need to call in the Global Warming Historic Temperature Adjusters.

  5. Dennis, CPA to the Gods

    Who needs the Russians to help throw an election when you have the Democratic Party?

    Evidently the same people who built the Obamacare website were hired to build the Iowa tabulation app.

    Good job, Democrats. Now get out there and sell yourselves on being the competent ones! You know, the ones who care run the healthcare and energy sectors.

  6. Dennis, Tiresome Denizen of Central Ohio

    It seems that Shadow, Inc., the company that developed the tabulation app that failed so spectacularly is run by a bunch of former operatives from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

    That shouldn’t upset the Bernie Bros at all.

  9. TD

    Is there ever a downside to would be leaders and their supporters demonstrating that they’re a bunch of clowns?

  10. Bloke in North Dorset

    Obama’s getting a bit of a kicking over this as well. Former Democrat White House staffer:

    Matt Stoller
    @matthewstoller
    Honestly this is on Obama, who spent more effort getting a rather incompetent Tom Perez to be the head of the DNC than on any other post-Presidential political effort.

  14. BniC

    The problem with awarding contracts to cronies is that they need to be smart enough to hire at least one competent person on the team that can deliver or at least sub-contract to a team and just take off their managment %

  15. Roger Moore's Left Eyebrow

    It seems that Shadow, Inc., the company that developed the tabulation app that failed so spectacularly is run by a bunch of former operatives from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign

    Imagine calling your company “Shadow Inc” tho.

    I presume “S.P.E.C.T.R.E” was taken.

  21. Dennis, Bullshit Detector

    Rumor has it that Richard Murphy will be hired to sort it all out. Given what’s happened in the past 24 hours, I find it hard to disbelieve. The only hold-up, I’m told, is that Murphy doesn’t want to come to the USA and be trapped in Duh Moines by an outbreak of chlorinated chickens.

  22. Bloke in North Dorset

    Bloody hell, the Dems really are a Mafia. Via >a href=”https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/iowa-caucuses-the-blob-and-the-democratic>Matt Stoller’s newsletter. Its a long read but worth it:

    It’s always been a bit of a puzzle for me to define just what the Democratic Party is. There are no formal membership dues, and registration varies by state. Candidates can sometimes run for the party nomination without being a member. And that leaves out the actual mechanisms of governance, the think tanks, banks, corporations, and law firms in which the various policy experts work as a sort of shadow government.

    One of the better books on the Democratic Party comes from a former Joe Biden staffer, Jeff Connaughton, who coined the term “the blob” to denote the network of lawyers, lobbyists, Congressional staffers, foreign policy experts, podcasters, media figures and pollsters who comprise the groupthink of the Democrats. These people know each other, marry each other, take vacations together, book each other on shows, hire each other, and work together on policies and campaigns. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a community.

    But that community, if it becomes immune from external pressure, can become dangerous. And that’s what happened in Iowa.

    …

    Just as Iowa’s a cartel, so too are many of the Democratic institutions in D.C. and Silicon Valley that supply the underlying campaign infrastructure. One useful example of this cartel was when an arm of Congressional Democrats, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) created a blacklist of political operatives for those who sought to aid anyone challenging an incumbent Democrat. This move was straightforward economic coercion against those who make their living working on political campaigns, often for populist primary challengers.

    …

    Acronym is an an organizing vehicle for a $75 million digital spending campaign for large Democratic donors against Trump. Basically the pitch from Acronym was, ‘we need to be high tech to beat Trump,’ which means collecting money from rich people and unions and buying YouTube and Facebook ads with it.

    The function of the nonprofit is simple, it’s an ad buying firm full of ex-Facebook employees. See for instance the following:

    Solomon Messing
    @SolomonMg
    PROFESSIONAL NEWS ALERT: I recently took a new role as ACRONYM’s Chief Scientist. I’m thrilled to join the amazing team that @taraemcg put together & to once again work with @jimmyeatcarbs, @TatendaCheryl, & other FB veterans.
    February 3rd 2020

    The key validator for Acronym is board member David Plouffe, the former campaign manager for Barack Obama. Plouffe is also the head of policy and advocacy for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Plouffe unlocks the trust of the entire Democratic operative class, meaning that Acronym’s technology is being used not just by the Iowa Democrats, but by Nevada Democrats, and a host of campaigns, unions, and nonprofits.

  23. john77

    The technical incompetence of the Democrats’ IT contractor suggests to me that its the salespeople in the high tech companies who are aggressively “liberal” while most of the quietly competent techies are apolitical or mild Republicans (is there a difference?)

  24. BniC

    Was thinking what the scope of work might be

    -about 2,000 sites
    -submitting numbers from a manual count
    -couple of rounds (independently counted)
    -11 candidates to vote for for most probably less than 40 pieces of data per site need to be recorded
    -secure login for users
    -data for each site to be summed up only and % calculates
    -No complex calculation, no vote reassignment

    Not exactly a difficult task, if they have existing party login id/identity then even easier.
    Reckon you could send every site a spreadsheet, have them send it back and manually aggregate data and report quicker than this screw up
    In fact the reporting aspect seems to be the easiest part, simple addition and a % so screwing that up is even worse.

  26. john77

    @ BniC
    For most simple jobs, computerisation slows things down. I’ve been in charge of more than one computerised reporting system (that I did not design) and I know.
    Half a century ago I could have programmed a computer to do the sums for the Iowa caucuses but I should have pointed out that it was quicker by hand – and back then someone would have listened.

  27. Baron Jackfield

    I’m afraid that the level of incompetence shown appears to be similar to that possessed by whoever it is that advised Boris that we can all use electric vehicles by 2035…

  28. Pcar

    As clever people Mr Worstall (& Richard) can’t be bothered to put on Youtube, or even provide Al-Beeb prog name or link

    Brexit day, Brexit visions – Fri 31 Jan 2020 08:32
    Manuela Saragosa hosts a debate* between two people with opposing views. Tim Worstall of the pro-free-market think tank The Adam Smith Institute, and Miatta Fahnbulleh, chief executive of the left-of-centre think tank, the New Economics Foundation
    BBC – Download Podcast
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csy6zx

    Not listened yet, but not on NEF channel….

    * debate? Tim said he had to submit his audio file in advance – oh, it’s an EU Parliament type non-debate debate

  30. Mohave Greenie

    It has now been about 24 hours since the caucus. The results stand at 62% of the precincts reporting. That is more than enough time to have written the results down and driven them to Democrat headquarters. The Pony Express could have delivered them faster. Iowa is not that big a state.

    In other news; Trump took all of the delagates but one on the Republican side. William Weld got a lone delagate.

  32. Bloke in Costa Rica

    This is a trivial data-handling task. Even the authentication and verification issues are off-the-peg. I’ve written things for my own amusement in an afternoon that are more technically challenging. Essentially, the Democrats, who lose no time in telling people they represent the smart, the tech-savvy, the scientifically-literate, have not mastered the technical challenge of counting how many people there are in each corner of a high school gymnasium and reliably communicating those numbers to a third party. Meanwhile, the stump-jawed yokels of the Republican party had no trouble whatsoever. And this is all assuming you even need to do this electronically. Those handheld tally clicker things they use at the cinema and that you can buy on Amazon for $15 a six-pack are all the technology you need., that and a reporter’s notebook to write the numbers down, some witnesses for each candidate to certify, and a phone. A caucus ought to be even faster to tally than a primary, because the number of participants is so minute. It’s an utterly ludicrous way to choose a candidate, of course, and with any luck this debacle will help grease the skids.

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