6 February 2020 — 1817 mst
Iowa DP’s caucus reporting debacle reveals
limitations of smartphones in politics
Iowa’s Democratic Party smartly laid a paper trail of the decisions made in its precinct caucuses on 3 February. But it stupidly chose to report the results of the approximately 1,750 caucuses electronically using smartphones.
Most reports have focused on the rushed and incompetent development of the reporting application. But even if the app had been properly developed and deployed, the decision to use a smartphone was flawed and doomed the project from the beginning.
Counting caucus votes and allocating delegates is not difficult. I learned the process in the sixties and early seventies when I lived in Minnesota. But it’s not as easy as it seems because it’s only done every few years. Proficiency requires frequent practice, not just a training session the weekend before the caucus. And the counts and allocations are conducted in crowded, noisy, venues by weary and stressed volunteers, many in their mid-sixties and older.
Older people need brighter lighting and larger text. Often they also need a bit more time.
Smartphones are bright enough, but their screens are small and thus the text is small. A larger screen, such as on a mid-sized or larger iPad or a laptop or desktop computer, is a tremendous help for older people.
A larger screen also helps people working with large documents.
In Iowa, the precinct chairs tallied the results on a letter-sized paper worksheet, essentially a spreadsheet. The information on that worksheet had to be transferred to the IDP’s state headquarters electronically, either by telephone, the traditional method, and for many precinct chairs, the preferred method, or by entering it into an app on a smartphone, which by definition has a small screen. Using a laptop with good keyboard and a mouse would have made the process much easier.
Easier, at least, for precinct chairs accustomed to working with Excel, Numbers, or another spreadsheet. For chairs who use computers and smartphones for text messages, email, creating text documents, and cruising the web, and for nothing else, using a smartphone or laptop as a terminal for entering information to be transmitted to a central database would often be a daunting project. Especially under stress.
Smartphones excel at transmitting small bursts of text, at sending and receiving meeting notices, and for hectoring voters whose refusal to vote early annoys and offends political operatives who are trying to lock down votes. But although there are spreadsheet apps for smartphones (my iPhone has Numbers), they’re far from convenient to use.
None of these limitation occurred to the IDP honchos who commissioned the smartphone app, who use smartphones effortlessly and obsessively, and who are incapable of understanding that not everyone shares their love for, or proficiency with, these fiendish little devices.
A laptop would have been a better choice.
And better than a laptop? Faxing the worksheets to IDP HQ. That’s an application of appropriate technology. It’s commonsense. But among the IDP’s insouciant, overconfident, gizmo bewitched, smartphone addicted, technophiles, commonsense was anathema. And the warnings of experts that the scheme wouldn’t work were ignored, because smartphone using party officials without the ability to develop computer applications thought they knew better than the experts who did. Now they need to remove that corncob they were warned not to sit on.