Democratic primary watch

[Nodack]

Iowa results coming in and they are surprising. Buttigieg, Sanders, Warren 1, 2, 3 so far. Biden way down.

[Indy]

Why would anyone trust a mobile app for voting? Jeez.

[Nodack]

Because it’s where everything has gone. All my banking is done through apps now. I buy everything online. We do everything online now and it is secure enough for our money, why not voting? Isn’t Seattle going to use an app in their elections this year? Voting online is new and they need to work out the bugs and make sure it’s secure but obviously it’s the future and makes voting much easier for people, which should help with participation.

[Mori Chu]

Bernie fans are quick to point out that he has more popular votes than Buttigieg, but the delegate count is narrowly in Pete's favor so far.

Pretty amazing to see Biden so far down. Word on the street is that his organization and ground game was weak, he just didn't have as many people out there campaigning for him, and that when he visited the state, his town halls and meetings were less energetic and inspiring than those of other candidates.

I personally find Biden the least appealing of the current top-5 Dem candidates, so I hope he falls out of first place and isn't the nominee. I most want Warren, but I'd happily take Klobuchar or the others over Biden.

[Mori Chu]

Why would anyone trust a mobile app for voting? Jeez.

I have less of a blanket objection to app-based vote recording, and more of an objection to how they have done it in this case. They contracted a company to build an app over this past holiday season, and they never had a full test of the system or much formal training for the people running the various caucus locations. Then on the big day, of course it has issues and of course people can't figure out how to work the app. Amateur hour.

[Nodack]

Perhaps Trumps smear campaign against Biden had an effect he was looking for after all. Those tactics work against Democrats. They don’t work on Trump. The more sleaze you uncover about Trump, the more his base likes him.

A Republican friend said the App didn’t work because it was an app made by a company Hillary Clinton owned and it was all part of her clever scheme.

[Superbone]

Perhaps Trumps smear campaign against Biden had an effect he was looking for after all. Those tactics work against Democrats. They don’t work on Trump. The more sleaze you uncover about Trump, the more his base likes him.

A Republican friend said the App didn’t work because it was an app made by a company Hillary Clinton owned and it was all part of her clever scheme.

I am sure the Russians had something to do with it.

[Nodack]

App made by Clinton campaign veterans’ firm is behind Iowa caucuses debacle
https://www.latimes.com/business/techno ... -app-snafu
In 2016, for the first time, precinct chairs used a smartphone app built by Microsoft to relay results to party headquarters, enabling faster reporting than communicating via telephone hotline. This year, with the state party promising to disclose more granular data than in the past, the job of coding the app went to a fledgling tech firm run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

“We feel really terrible,” Shadow Chief Executive Gerard Niemira told Bloomberg in an interview Tuesday. He blamed the breakdown on a bug in the app’s code, which he said had been discovered and fixed by 10 p.m. But by then, the damage was done.

Shadow started out as Groundbase, a tech developer co-founded by Niemira and Krista Davis, who worked for the tech team on Clinton’s campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination. In January 2019, it was acquired by ACRONYM, a Democratic nonprofit founded in 2017 “to educate, inspire, register, and mobilize voters,” according to its website. ACRONYM’s founder and CEO is Tara McGowan, a former journalist and digital producer with President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign.

[Indy]

Because it’s where everything has gone. All my banking is done through apps now. I buy everything online. We do everything online now and it is secure enough for our money, why not voting? Isn’t Seattle going to use an app in their elections this year? Voting online is new and they need to work out the bugs and make sure it’s secure but obviously it’s the future and makes voting much easier for people, which should help with participation.

assuming everyone has the internet and a smart device is just one blind spot here. The reason mobile banking took off is because the banks can keep a lot more of your money if you don't have to see a person to do your business. Same with retailers. I am not saying we shouldn't have these things, but when even things like WhatsApp with its end to end encryption can be hacked by someone sitting 7 thousand miles away, it shows there needs to be much more emphasis on local, receipt-backed protections.

[Superbone]

Sure, blame it on a programmer.

[Nodack]

It does need to be secure. It should be super secure. They move billions over the internet every day and people are more serious about money than voting. We have a ginormous government with an unlimited credit card. We went to the moon. It shouldn’t be that hard. You cannot stop progress. Cars will be self driving and we will vote on the internet or whatever that evolves into in the future.

[Superbone]

It does need to be secure. It should be super secure. They move billions over the internet every day and people are more serious about money than voting. We have a ginormous government with an unlimited credit card. We went to the moon. It shouldn’t be that hard. You cannot stop progress. Cars will be self driving and we will vote on the internet or whatever that evolves into in the future.

This.

[Indy]

It does need to be secure. It should be super secure. They move billions over the internet every day and people are more serious about money than voting. We have a ginormous government with an unlimited credit card. We went to the moon. It shouldn’t be that hard. You cannot stop progress. Cars will be self driving and we will vote on the internet or whatever that evolves into in the future.

Yes but it isn't close to that now. So trying out a new voting app right now is probably not a smart thing. You would think it would be vetted by external security experts, validated to be end-to-end and those results made public before using it to count votes. I haven't read anything that says these things happened.

And if you transfer money via an app, you have a receipt with an ID, the person receiving the funds has a receipt with an ID, and you verify with each other that the transaction happened as intended. If voting is anonymous, how do you verify your vote was counted without removing the anonymity?

[Mori Chu]

Software built for financial transactions or for going to the moon is not thrown together in such a slapdash way. They don't start hacking together the bank app a few weeks before you start transferring money on it. I don't doubt that technology is the way of the future for our elections, but it must be done in a more mature and careful fashion for it to be a net positive.

[Superbone]

Software built for financial transactions or for going to the moon is not thrown together in such a slapdash way. They don't start hacking together the bank app a few weeks before you start transferring money on it. I don't doubt that technology is the way of the future for our elections, but it must be done in a more mature and careful fashion for it to be a net positive.

Definitely.

[Nodack]

Trump supporters flooded Iowa hotline, increasing delays
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4 ... ays-report
A hotline that was used by Iowa precinct chairs to report Democratic caucus results to the state party was reportedly flooded with calls on Monday from supporters of President Trump after the number was posted online, contributed to the delays in the vote tallying process.

NBC reported that the number was posted on the fringe website 4chan, along with encouragement to "clog the lines."

[Mori Chu]

^ They're also planning to flood the "open" primary in upcoming states, where anybody not just registered Dems can vote, and cast votes for Sanders. They think he's the easiest candidate to beat because he's a "socialist" and so on.

[Nodack]

Republicans in open warfare against Democrats elections.

“Clog their lines. Fuck them up.”

“See, the Democrats elections are messed up. They don’t know what they are doing.”

[Indy]

Republicans in open warfare against Democrats elections.

“Clog their lines. Fuck them up.”

“See, the Democrats elections are messed up. They don’t know what they are doing.”

the tactic seems to be working well so far. you know it is bad when tea party republicans are abandoning the GOP and supporting Dems.

[Nodack]

Sanders, Buttigieg and Klobuchar 1, 2, 3 in NH so far. Everybody else far behind. Biden 5th and fading fast. Looks like Trumps gamble paid off for him. I am ok with Biden being out. I didn’t like the look of him and his son in the Ukraine and maybe other people didn’t either. Kind of sad that Trump could actually get caught doing something much worse than what he accused the Bidens of and he walks away stronger and it was Biden’s reputation that took a hit. It just shows me that Dems care about whether their candidate is honest or not and the other side obviously couldn’t care any less what bad things their candidate does.

Iowa always starts the process and whoever won Iowa has won the nomination the last for times. Iowa was a debacle so, it was important to see where NH went and the trend has continued in NH.