Embed from Getty Images

I went to bed at 9 pm, because I’m keeping up with my “winter sleep schedule.” It’s called self-care. God bless any of you for staying up to watch what was happening with the Iowa Caucuses last night. I fully expected to sit here this morning and write about how Pete Buttigieg or Bernie Sanders swept the caucuses. They did not. Or they might have, who knows. We don’t know because the caucus process was… absolute chaos, and the winner (winners?) won’t be announced until later today, after a lot of sh-t has been sorted out:

Troy Price, the chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, said shortly after 1 a.m. Central time that he expected to have caucus results to report “later today” after party officials had manually tallied the data. On a brief conference call with reporters, Mr. Price stressed that the caucus results were being delayed because of problems reporting delegate totals from the more than 1,600 precincts, not because the system had been hacked.

“This is taking longer than expected,” he said. “The system is in place to make sure we can report results with full confidence.”

Several hours after the caucuses ended, the state party still has not publicly reported any results. Mr. Price did not take questions, and the call ended after he finished reading his statement. He said the system the party put in place for 2020, which requires written records for each precinct’s results, was implemented in case such a communications breakdown took place. “We have backups in place for this reason,” he said. “We are updating campaigns and will continue to provide updates as they are available.”

“We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results,” said Mandy McClure, the party’s communications director. “In addition to the tech systems being used to tabulate results, we are also using photos of results and a paper trail to validate that all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report. 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.”

On a conference call with the presidential campaigns, Iowa Democratic Party officials said the delay was because of the new rules requiring caucus leaders to report three sets of numbers to party headquarters, rather than just the delegate totals. Representatives from the campaigns became angry at the party officials, who hung up after being asked about when results might be known, according to two people who listened to the call. Since the caucuses began 50 years ago, Iowa Democrats reported only one number: the delegate count from each of the state’s precincts. But after the razor-close 2016 race in Iowa between Hillary Clinton and Mr. Sanders, Mr. Sanders’s allies pushed the Democratic National Committee to require caucus states to track and report the raw numbers of how many people backed each candidate.

[From The NY Times]

Imagine how tired we already are. I get that it’s “history” and Iowa loves being “first” but enough is enough. Either fix this system or you don’t get to be “first,” Iowa. I’m saying that as someone who is not particularly eager to see the results too – Iowa is a massively white state and Iowans have clung to candidates with massive racial blind-spots like Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders. Sorry, peeps. I’m waiting to see how South Carolina votes, then I’ll be there in line on Super Tuesday a few days later.

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

Photos courtesy of Getty.