What is the Iowa Caucus and Why is it So Dysfunctional?
The Iowa Caucus is probably the best thing to ever happen to Iowa. It is the one thing that makes Iowa special, and frankly, some would argue, the only thing that makes Iowa the least bit interesting. It’s also the most simple, and yet the most excruciatingly confusing, way of voting, possibly ever.
The Objective: Earn most pledged delegates possible like in primaries, but in a Caucus, you group together in different parts of the room based on who you support. For example, you would stand in the left corner if you like Bernie and in the right corner if you like Biden. Yeah. That’s literally it. It’s really weird.
The caucuses begin when the clock strikes 7 PM, and all the precinct locations (all 1,678 of them) close their doors and begin voting. The neighbors will listen to messages from local officials and the Democratic candidates, and all stand around and talk about their preferred candidate.
When the actual Caucuses begin, everyone is instructed to a certain area of the room based on their candidate of choice. A candidate needs at least 15% of the people to huddle together at that precinct in order to remain in the process and thus be considered as a likely contender for president. If less than 15% of the people gather for a candidate, that candidate is no longer a part of that precinct’s election process. . Those who voted for a candidate that didn’t meet the qualifications must choose another candidate to side with, or form another grouping of a different candidate.
The final vote is tallied and ultimately determines the delegates each candidate gets.
So what happened? Well, in a rather late and lame attempt to change with the times, the Democratic Party of Iowa made an app to help make the process of tallying the votes easier. This failed, of course. The party has said that the app failure was not due to any sort of interference or hacking but simply just a coding error. The creator of the app was fired. The big problem was that the app was not communicating the complete data, and so it was announced that the results would be fully released on Monday at 5:00 pm. Only a fraction of the precinct’s data was actually released on Monday, and it was not until Wednesday that about 96% of precincts’ data was released. HOWEVER, according to a New York Times analysis, the results were inconsistent and weren’t feasible under the caucuses' complicated rules. On Thursday, the chairman of the Democratic Party called for a recanvass (which is essentially a recount) in the form of a tweet. The current data we have shows that Pete Buttigieg is in first place but is polling only 0.1% over Bernie Sanders. Both campaigns have flaunted this as a complete victory despite the uncertainty over the results. Elizabeth Warren is in third and Joe Biden is fourth place.
It should be noted that there is quite a bit of controversy over the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire Primary because both have an extremely powerful effect on a candidate’s support. However, neither state is an accurate representation of the American population in terms of race, and with that, there are a lot of unknowns still involved with the upcoming election.