In flagrante

The February 3 Iowa Caucus debacle arose from app tabulation inconsistencies reported by numerous local caucus officials distressed to find their vote tallies being garbled by the app. That much we know. We also know the app was designed by Shadow, Inc., a one-year-old startup company which, according to a February 4 AP report …

  • … was founded … by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign …
  • … was launched by ACRONYM, a nonprofit corporation founded in 2017 by Tara McGowan … (who) is married to Michael Halle, a senior strategist for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, which records show has also paid Shadow Inc. $42,500 for software.

This election cycle, caucus results are being published by the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) as three interlocking metrics:

  • popular vote count, which is used to determine …
  • “state delegate equivalent” count, which is used to determine …
  • convention delegates awarded

Iowa’s “state delegate equivalent” system is a mini-electoral college. Actual votes enter one end of the overall caucus process, pass through the “state delegate equivalent” mathematics wormhole, and come out the other end as convention delegates.

As the results slowly, ever so slowly, began to roll in, we were told that Sanders had won the popular vote count by about 6,000 votes. That’s a 3.5 point lead. Not a landslide, but decisive. The general consensus as late as February 7 was that Sanders and Buttigieg would be awarded exactly the same number of convention delegates, 11 each, which seemed reasonable given the razor-thin Buttigieg “state delegate equivalent” lead of 564 to 562.

So with Sanders winning the popular vote by 3.5 points, Buttigieg winning the state delegate equivalent count by 1/10th of one percent and a convention delegate count tie likely, how do you suppose mainstream media framed reality-in-progress for the body politic? Perhaps the headlines will give us a clue: How Pete Beat Joe, The Audacity of Pete, Pete Buttigieg keeps narrow lead in Iowa caucuses. It seems doubtful that, if Sanders had lost the popular vote and presumptively tied in the convention delegate count, but was leading by 1/10th of one percent in the effectively irrelevant state delegate equivalent count, the headlines would have touted a Sanders lead, let alone victory.

Yet on February 4, Pete Buttigieg declared victory based on the ambiguous metrics described above and mainstream media ran with it. But when, on February 6, the Sanders campaign declared victory based on the vote counts it had by then received directly from caucus sites, DNC Chairman Tom Perez called for a “surgical recanvassing” of caucus results. It seems odd that Perez should have waited through three days of chaos, only to demand a recanvassing within mere minutes of Sanders declaring victory, but let’s leave that alone. As of today, the IDP has awarded Buttigieg 13 convention delegates and Sanders 12. Thus, Buttigieg’s 6,000-vote deficit somehow produced a 0.1% state delegate equivalent advantage, which in turn produced a 7.7% convention delegate advantage.

To what extent we owe any of this to the Shadow app, the IDP, the DNC, or the founder of Shadow’s parent company sharing a marital bed with one of the Buttigieg campaign’s senior staff members is impossible to say. Nor can I prove any direct connection between Shadow Inc.’s January 2019 launch and the launch of Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign three months later. And as for Shadow’s Hillary Clinton-saturated provenance, taken with Clinton’s recent dismissals of Sanders as someone “nobody likes,” who’s to say?

In the midst of calls from the Sanders and Buttigieg campaigns to recanvass specific caucus results, a lawyer for the IDP made the rather astounding assertion that known math errors in vote tabulation documents must be left as-is, because correcting them would violate the “integrity of the process.” As reported February 10 in The Chicago Tribune …

“The incorrect math on the Caucus Math Worksheets must not be changed to ensure the integrity of the process,” wrote the party lawyer, Shayla McCormally, according to an email sent by Troy Price, chair of the party, to its central committee members. The lawyer said correcting the math would introduce “personal opinion” into the official record of results.

It would seem, therefore, a portal has opened between us and a parallel universe that is a parody of our own. Either that, or what’s being labeled “conspiracy theory” thinking is, in fact, nothing more than the exercise of simple pattern recognition skills.