Republicans in Iowa are working overtime to prevent a repeat of the botched 2012 caucuses when scores of unaccounted ballots caused Mitt Romney to be wrongly declared the winner over Rick Santorum.
State party officials say they’ve moved aggressively to address the problems that plagued the ballot count in January 2012, and believe the new technologies they’ve adopted, as well as having more workers on staff and enhanced training programs, will pave the way for a smooth and accurate reckoning at the Feb. 1. caucuses.
The state party will be using a new technological platform for the first time, and there is always an element of chaos in caucuses, which are largely carried out by volunteer activists. The stakes will be higher than ever, as the huge and fractured field of GOP candidates will seek every conceivable advantage to stand out from the pack.
The number of votes separating second place from sixth place could be slim, and the order of how the candidates finish could be the difference between a campaign that carries on, and one that calls it quits.
For John Brabender, a senior adviser to Santorum’s 2016 campaign who served in the same role in 2012, the memories of the ballot-counting errors, which he believes it cost his campaign, are as fresh as ever. “It is imperative that they get it right this time,” Brabender said. “It impacted us tremendously, although we didn’t realize how fully until several days later.”
According to the Election Day count, Romney edged Santorum by eight votes. But two weeks later, after the State party frantically moved to hunt down missing ballots and account for paperwork irregularities, it declared that Santorum had actually won by just more than 30 votes.
Brabender said the media narrative in the days after the contest focused on Romney’s victory and perceived inevitability, instead of the story line that Santorum had come out of nowhere to emerge as a viable grassroots challenger to the establishment candidate. He estimated that it cost the Santorum campaign “a couple million” dollars in donations, and a huge amount of earned media attention at a critical juncture in the race. He also said it had an impact on the results in other contests, like in Michigan, Romney’s home state, where the eventual GOP nominee only narrowly defeated Santorum.
The results from eight precincts went missing and were never recovered, according to the Register, and officials found paperwork irregularities in results submitted from 131 precincts. The State party believes it has done enough to ensure that won’t happen again.
Last time, precinct and county officials called their results in to an automated system, punching the numbers into their phones, with no immediate check on whether they’d typed the figures in correctly.
This time, the State party has modernized the process, partnering with Microsoft to develop a caucus reporting phone app with several levels of user authentication and data checks, as well as algorithms that provide an automated “smell test.”
The party is confident in the new technology, and says it will certify the final results within 48 hours, instead of the two weeks it has needed in the past.
Still, there are risks inherent in going live with a new technological platform, pointing to Romney’s 2012 get-out-the-vote system ORCA, which famously crashed on Election Day. But in addition to the new technology, the State party says it has never been so strong operationally at this point in the cycle.
The Iowa GOP has the most staff it’s ever had on the ground, helping it to secure the caucusing locations, the laborious process of finding the schools, firehouses and other places where voters will gather, earlier than ever before.
The State party says it has conducted more training sessions than ever before, 83 so far, in most of the state’s counties, and plans to hold at least one training session with officials in all 99 of the state’s counties, which it has never done before.
Still, there are always variables within a caucus that cannot be accounted for.
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
No comments:
Post a Comment