The big story There were plenty of political happenings this week, but in regards to tech, the story to pay attention to was the Iowa caucus fiasco, a few of TechCrunch’s writers, myself excluded, got to chatting and this Extra Crunch story really expressed some wide views on what’s at stake. I thought this was worth highlighting, there are some more viewpoints expressed but I’ll save those for the EC subscribers among you. “A n app intended to speed up reporting of election results for the Iowa caucuses has failed spectacularly, not only confusing the electorate but perhaps poisoning their feelings toward making any technological "improvements" to the voting process whatsoever. TechCrunch staff reporters Brian Heater, Jonathan Shieber, Zack Whittaker, Devin Coldewey and Ingrid Lunden discussed the issue informally. Brian Heater: We all agree that this is a good sign of a healthy democracy, right? Jonathan Shieber: Totally agree with Brian here. Brian Heater: I'm legitimately finding it difficult to discuss these sorts of things without delving into the conspiratorial. That said, I think it's far more likely that this was just a massive fuck-up on the part of the Iowa Dems. Chalking it up to a conspiracy is honestly giving them entirely too much credit. Devin Coldewey: But what's the nature of the fuck-up? Fundamentally? Brian Heater: An app that wasn't tested at the scale of a statewide election. The more we move away from more traditional means of accounting, the more of these we're going to see. Devin Coldewey: There's a chicken-and-egg problem, though. If we want to do any kind of online voting system, we're going to need to test it. How do we go about doing that? I'll certainly grant, however, that a first trial run on one of the most important political contests in the presidential election isn't ideal. Ingrid Lunden: Well, you could say that this was a kind of test. It ran alongside a manual process and it was specifically delayed and halted because the early counts were not tallying up. I don't dispute for a second that this was a disaster and makes the Democrats — I don't care if it's Iowa Dems or someone at another level who called this shot — look bad. But just as I hope this won't mean curtains for the Dems altogether, I also don't think it's curtains for this kind of approach of using an app to help tally and parse the results at a faster pace. Brian Heater: I'm not a voting app expert, but there are trials for running this at a much larger scale. It boggles the mind that this was barely publicized ahead of time. Certainly that doesn't bode well for their confidence in the project. There's zero chance of restoring the electorate's faith in the results after a bungle like this. The best and only thing to do is ensure this won't happen again. Which it almost certainly will….” Read more on Extra Crunch | 
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