DES MOINES — Sean Bagniewski had seen the problems coming.
It wasn’t so much that the new app that the Iowa Democratic Party had planned to use to report its caucus results didn’t work. It was that people were struggling to even log in or download it in the first place. After all, there had never been any app-specific training for the many precinct chairs.
So last Thursday Mr. Bagniewski, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Iowa’s most populous county, Polk, instructed his precinct chairs to simply call in the caucus results as they had always done. But during Monday night’s caucuses, those precinct chairs could not connect with party leaders via phone. Hold times stretched past 90 minutes. And when Mr. Bagniewski had his executive director to take pictures of the results with her smartphone and drive over to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters to deliver them in person she was turned away without explanation.
“I don’t even know if they know what they don’t know,” Mr. Bagniewski said of the state party shortly before 2 a.m. on Tuesday.
Inside the party’s boiler room, the warning signs flashed almost as soon as results came in from the new app — as early as 8:15 p.m. The error rate was high, even as raw data seemed fine. Somehow it was mangled in the process of transmitting it for display. No one could figure out why.
And so, for nearly 22 hours after the Iowa caucuses had begun — with much fanfare, live cable coverage and deep consequences for the Democratic Party and the country — the state party remained silent.
This surreal opening act for the voting portion of the 2020 primary season included unexplained “inconsistencies” in results that were not released to the public until late Tuesday afternoon, heated conference calls where state party officials hung up on campaign staff members and a state of suspended animation in the immediate aftermath of the first presidential nominating contest.
“A systemwide disaster,” said Derek Eadon, a former Iowa Democratic Party chairman.