Coincidence, Incompetence, or Conspiracy?

Nobody disputes that the way this caucus transpired was a catastrophe. Outlets as mainstream as the Washington Post and New York Times have called it an “epic fiasco” and a “tech disaster.” The question is, why was this caucus such a catastrophe? Were all of the ridiculous events and disturbingly wrong reports a result of a series of coincidences, breathtaking and widespread incompetence, or a deliberate plan to help one candidate in this primary at the expense of another?

When attempting to discern the underlying reasons why things descended into chaos and counting errors, it’s important to consider the events and what’s at stake in their totality. Any one incidence of malfeasance can often be explained by the simple incompetence or dishonesty of a single actor. In this case, the series of events in their totality — and the impact they have had in what has become a burgeoning struggle for power inside the Democratic Party —should force anyone who cares about the truth not only to closely investigate individual events, but to step back and consider the forces at play.

As evidenced by the “Stop Bernie” meetings of 2019 and the many attacks on Bernie by the establishment Left, it is clear that there is a battle today for control of the Democratic Party. This battle erupted onto the political scene with the rise of Bernie Sanders in 2015, but I would suggest it truly sprouted from widespread disappointment with Obama during his first term; the recession, bailouts, and foreclosures at the end of the last decade; and the Occupy Wall Street and radical climate movements. This party is cleaving in two, with the “centrists” — or “New Democrats” — on one side, and the “progressives” on the other. The “New Democrats” rose to power with the Democratic Leadership Council and Koch money in the late 1980s; a well-funded, pro-corporate-power, somewhat-socially-liberal approach propelled the Clintons into the White House and onto the top of the mountain in the Democratic world. The “progressives” are the ones leading a mass movement of people disillusioned with the outsourcing of jobs, unfettered capitalism, endless war, corruption, racist criminal justice, environmental destruction, and austerity in the form of falling wages and rising healthcare and housing costs. The hold on the party that the “centrists” have enjoyed for decades has never been more threatened than it is today.

Coincidence. Let’s first consider coincidence and determine whether the events of this caucus can be explained by improbable happenstance. Taking one unusual event—Bernie Sanders losing by the same less-than-a-quarter-percent margin this year as he did to an establishment candidate in 2016, for instance—you could logically say, “yes, wow, that is really unlikely and very surprising, but it’s just a coincidence.”

Now, could it be also just a coincidence that Buttigieg gave a victory speech with only 1.8% of the precincts reporting and Bernie Sanders actually in the lead? Could it be also just a coincidence that the numbers thereafter were released so slowly — over the course of two days — and that all of the precincts favoring Buttigieg were released first and during prime news cycle hours? Could it be also just a coincidence that when the final numbers were released they dropped literally at the moment Buttigieg stepped on stage for a prime time CNN town hall, providing him an unusually telegenic scene? Could it be also just a coincidence that for the first time in its existence the Des Moines Register “gold standard” poll was canceled on the eve of the caucus? Similarly, could it be just a coincidence that for the first time since Ann Selzer began polling in 1988 that this “gold standard” poll didn’t accurately predict the winner on the Democratic side?

When you have many coincidences of this type — improbable or unprecedented events — and they all favor the same candidate, the rules of probability assert themselves.

Let’s look a little more deeply at one putative coincidence: the release of the numbers. Even if one assumes that the Shadow app numbers were completely legitimate and fair, and that all the revisions to those numbers were legitimate as well (and I’m not saying that assumption is justified), still, why, one must ask, were the Buttigieg-favoring precincts reported first, one after another, allowing the media to run for a day and a half with an apparent Buttigieg victory, before numbers for the Sanders-favoring precincts came in? And why were the reporting of results canceled three times, all apparently just as Sanders was pulling even or ahead?

Considering them all, in my calculation, there are simply too many highly improbable events favoring one outcome to wave them all off as mere coincidences.

Incompetence. What about incompetence? Could stupidity, inexperience, and simple misunderstandings explain the catastrophic way this caucus unfolded? The fact that so many coin tosses looked rigged — and resulted in more delegates for Buttigieg than for any other candidate — probably just means a handful of people in Iowa didn’t know how to flip a coin fairly in a public setting. The fact that the Shadow app was written so poorly and was rushed through testing so quickly, and that it ran into countless issues, the largest of which prevented submission of photographs of hand-counted caucus results to confirm reported numbers—possibly this could be explained by massive incompetence on the part of the CTO, the engineers, and the product team at Shadow if we can also suppose the CEO was sufficiently asleep at the wheel too. But then we run into a coincidence not mentioned above — that virtually the entire Shadow leadership team are former staffers at Hillary for America 2016, a group of people potentially antagonistic to Sanders. So we have to accept supposed incompetence and coincidence here.

Could it have been simple incompetence that in so many caucus sites, the numbers reported by workers at the caucus didn’t match the numbers reported in the Shadow app? This would be a huge amount of mathematical and stenographical incompetence for a state that by all accounts takes their responsibility as the “first in the nation” very seriously.

Could it have been simple incompetence that the IDP, and then the DNC, simply couldn’t add up the numbers correctly for days on end? Even after taking hours to release tiny portions of the results, they still had to revoke and revise the numbers they’d released. This is a pretty stunning level of mathematical and bookkeeping ineptitude if all they were doing was importing data and performing arithmetic.

Again, if the supposed incompetence benefited both sides roughly equally, this notion of feckless execution might be a compelling explanation for the events. But when the majority of the “mistakes” benefit one side, and it’s the side with both the power and the stated intent to bring about a certain outcome (in this case to “Stop Bernie”), and that outcome is in fact the result of the troubling events, incompetence as a complete explanation doesn’t make sense.

Therefore, based on everything we know right now, neither coincidence nor incompetence appears to sufficiently explain the events of the caucus.

If ruling out coincidence and incompetence here still seems too big a leap, could you be perhaps biased about the particular person or political party in question? Consider a scenario in which all of the facts are identical but instead of Pete Buttigieg it is Donald Trump for whom a poll is canceled, who makes a very early victory speech, who benefits from connections to a shadowy political tech company likely antagonistic to his opponent. What would you say in that scenario?

It is worth noting that things could change. Here are possible future events that could make incompetence and coincidence a more compelling explanation:

Terminations or resignations at Shadow and Acronym. If the true cause of the failures with the app was atrocious programming and testing, then we should see 2–3 people terminated at Shadow and a similar number at Acronym. Any honest company would release employees responsible for poor work that destroyed the company’s reputation. Similar terminations or resignations in the IDP and DNC. Ultimately this is the DNC and IDP’s show to run. If it was just incompetence that resulted in this catastrophe — and they really want to repair their reputation and prevent similar events going forward — there should be terminations for the people who were most responsible. Correction by the DNC of the final official results, including all mathematical and reporting errors uncovered by the Sanders campaign, independent journalists, and social media writers. These include the crowdsourced spreadsheet and visualization included above in this article. As in any industry, incompetent work should be addressed thoroughly and the task redone until it is complete and correct. Release by the Sanders campaign of their full numbers, and the numbers being similar to — or at least converging towards — the DNC’s reported numbers. Exit polls are instituted as a check against fraud in future primaries and caucuses. As I reported time and again in 2016, exit polls in the primary between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton revealed likely fraud until... they were abruptly canceled for remaining primaries, removing a significant check on potential fraud. Exit polls should be reinstituted now in 2020 for the sake of trust in the process.

NOTE: Cancelling future Iowa Caucuses should not be seen in any way to excuse this past caucus. It is another stated aim of the DNC to replace caucuses with primaries, but caucuses are harder to rig than primaries, not easier, since most primaries use secret unverified voting software that can change votes with even less visibility than we have with caucuses. It’s likely we’d know far less about the inner workings of this Iowa election had it been a primary. Also, progressives historically do better in caucuses, perhaps for this reason.

In summary, when little is at stake, incompetence and coincidences, taken together, can sometimes fully explain unexpected behavior of major institutions. And when coincidences and incompetence affect all parties in roughly equal measure, there is usually little reason to suspect foul play. But when supposedly innocent mistakes affect one side far more than the other, and when tremendous wealth and power is at stake as it is today — control of the Democratic Party, and with it the ability to set the “acceptable left side” of this country’s entire debate on issues — a concerted plan to maintain wealth and power looks less like a vast secret conspiracy and more like wealth and power doing what wealth and power does: ensuring it keeps wealth and power.

Conspiracy. So do we see evidence to suspect that there was a concerted plan behind the scenes to distort the results of this caucus? My friends, when looking at the totality of the events of the week, and the forces at play, I don’t think anyone with an open mind and the time to review the sequence of events can come to any other conclusion than this: There’s a prima facie case for election sabotage, vote manipulation, and deliberate deception in the management of public information, and this case should be taken very seriously by all parties who care about our democratic institutions.

In an investigation of a crime — and a crime is what this appears to be — one traditionally looks for means, motive, and opportunity. In this case all three are clearly present:

Means — the Shadow app, an unnecessary tool inserted into the process provided a method to slow down or shut down counting or reporting of caucus election numbers, as well as to adjust those numbers prior to final tabulation.

Motive—an intent to “Stop Bernie” has been openly stated by those in power at the top of the Democratic Party.

Opportunity — the IDP continuously slowed down the reporting of the votes, down to a crawl, which provided two full days to tweak the numbers. The DNC also stepped in and “took over” the counting of the vote on the second day.

I don’t suggest that I’ve conclusively proven anything here by putting together this timeline, but I believe that anyone who cares about the truth will find the explanation that best accounts for all the observed occurrences up to be a level of concerted planning behind the scenes, and will join a call for a deeper investigation.

Here’s Krystal Ball, host of the popular independent news show Rising, explaining more clearly than I can the clear prima facie case that this caucus was deliberately rigged: