Technology failure hits start of Democratic presidential nomination race

ARUL LOUIS: Technology failed the Democratic Party when it launched the process of selecting its candidate to run against President Donald Trump in the November 3 election and it could not announce the results as scheduled. The results reporting app introduced by the party crashed on Monday in Iowa, the first of the 50 US States to hold the party election. Officials ruled out a hack on the system after the party’s Iowa unit said that it found “inconsistencies in the reporting system” and was conducting quality checks.

On the Republican side, the election, which was a mere formality, went off smoothly with Trump getting 97.1 percent of the votes against two rivals, who each polled a little over 1 percent. Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale taunted the Democrats with a tweet: “They can’t even run a caucus and they want to run the government.”

In the US election system, party members vote to elect their candidate for the Presidential election and it traditionally starts with Iowa. The State follows the caucus system, which uses open balloting rather than secret voting, with registered party members gathering at 7 p.m. in voting precincts and standing in spots assigned to different candidates. Party election officials tally their numbers twice. After the first tally, voters for the lagging candidates are allowed to exercise their second preferences and a second and final tally is made. But party election officials could not transmit the results using the app and the backup phone reporting system using manual tabulation also failed. Party officials said the caucuses were secure because there was a paper trail and precincts were being asked to send in photos of the local tallies. As of Tuesday morning, the results were not announced. (IANS)

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