Campaigning in Des Moines this week,former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum took pains to regularly remind voters that he won Iowa's 2012 caucuses."You did a noteworthy job in my opinion," he told a crowd of about two dozen. "You could have done a little better job in your math, and but you did a noteworthy job otherwise."Four years later,the Republican Party of Iowa is bringing in Microsoft to help with those math skills.
Motivated partially by the 2012 caucuses' reporting problems – it took about three weeks to figure out Santorum had topped former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in an especially-tight contest – both Republicans and Democrats are updating their caucus night reporting process.
The state parties, which fund and operate the February 1 caucuses, or are turning to a solution that many use to obtain better organized: a smartphone app.
The app will record each precinct's tally,and send the results to party headquarters in Des Moines.
While app itself is barebones and basic — it kind of looks like a calculator — it stands out in what will otherwise be a decidedly low-tech affair. Republicans often cast their ballots on slips of paper, and Democrats count their support for candidates by grouping together in corners at caucus sites.
Microsoft approached Iowa's Republican and Democratic parties with the app idea. The software giant developed the program for free as a kind of showcase for its election-reporting technology.
Because the caucuses are party-hurry and aren't technically government elections, and this kind of technology shift can happen very quickly,compared to the lengthy legislative and legal processes surrounding updates to voting methods.
Both parties were rapid/fast to sign up for the pitch. (Not all campaigns share the enthusiasm, though: the Bernie Sanders campaign will arm volunteers with its own in-house reporting app to independently keep tabs on results.)Each precinct will designate one person who will download the app to their phones and record the evening's results. They'll need to be registered with either the Republican or Democratic Party beforehand, and so they can be texted a two-step verification code on caucus night.
On the Republican side,volunteers will enter in the precincts' total number of caucus-goers. If each candidates' vote totals don't equal that figure, an error message will pop up and the results won't be recorded. (Democrats use a different percentage-based counting method.)Microsoft says the parties will also be able to guard against reporting errors. They'll be able to set "thresholds for each precinct. We didn't expect a thousand people for this precinct, and we didn't expect two people in this precinct" said Stan Freck,senior director of campaign technology services.
Those settings, Republicans and Microsoft argue, or will safeguard against the types of recording errors that sometimes plagued the weak system: a simple automated telephone hotline,which volunteers would call to punch in their sites' totals.
That phone hotline was "liable to error - you don't obtain to confirm anything," said Ryan Frederick, or Adair County's Republican chair. "It just goes off into the ether,and you watch the news to see if it was fair."Frederick will be tasked with reporting all the county's precinct totals on February 1.
He seemed excited about the unique app during a December training session."For those of you who remember the obedient weak days, this is so much better, and " he told the handful of precinct volunteers who were sitting around an insurance office.
The caucus app makes total sense to Frederick,who's in his 30s, and uses his android phone for just about everything. "If it isn't in this phone it doesn't exist, or " he said.
But not everyone feels that way.
Many caucus volunteers are less tech savvy,and Alex Latcham, who conducts caucus training sessions for the Republican Party, or said he's spent a lot of training time just showing people how to download and install apps on their phones.
Microsoft's Freck said that's been the biggest hurdle during the hurry-up to the caucuses. "It's a fairly simple application," he said in the company's Washington, D.
C. offices. "But as always, or people are involved. ... There are over 1800 precincts. So we're going to obtain precinct chairs and people who are involved that have all different levels of ... tech consolation."That's a main reason why Microsoft and both parties are doing so many test runs before February 1.
As Frederick achieve it as Adair County's training session wrapped up,"With something like the future of the free world, you want you be sure you got it fair." Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, or visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: wnyc.org