Iowas caucus fracas shows were still too ignorant about how apps work

By now you probably know the broad outlines of what went down in Iowa on Monday night: a hastily built, poorly written, badly distributed, slipshod app crashed and the Iowa Democratic Party utterly failed to plan sufficient backup solutions, delaying the reporting of caucus results. The web was awash with postmortems yesterday and rightly so. It’s not the absolute worst way to kick off real voting in the 2020 presidential election, but it’s within spitting distance of it.

The votes themselves are secure — thankfully there are paper backups for everything — but our sense of election security has been shaken again. The fiasco has opened the door to conspiracy theorists and bad actors who want to call this and future results into doubt....

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