The conflict of interest here is stunning. The CEO of this company Acronym, which owns the app developer Shadow, received $100K from the Buttigieg campaign and her husband is an advisor for his campaign. Buttigieg's organizing director is also a former employee of Shadow. And the entire company is all former Hilary Clinton employees e.g. centrist democrats.
Quick observation: the vast majority of Democrats with the social connections to feel confident starting this kind of company will be affiliated with candidates who have won previous elections. This centralization is by design: the winner of presidential primary effectively becomes "head of party" and installs their own leadership at the national committee level.
This is true, but it's also part of what's broken in the poli-tech space -- if you're starting a business there, the connections you have matter much more than your experience and/or competence in application design, UX, operations, etc. You don't get customers by building a better product, you get customers by lining up influential people behind you. So the software products that serve this space tend in general to be pretty underwhelming.
This can be classified as a mutated variation of Enterprise Software Syndrome, the disease that makes enterprise software suck so badly.
We work with, spend time with, and collaborate with people we trust. That trust usually comes from repeated, direct, human interaction or as a referral from someone who has that long-built trust.
That applies to the vendors we choose, the babysitters we hire, and the doctors we visit.
Asking someone to choose someone they don't trust is inherently risky, even if it works out.
Yup. This is no different than a bunch of blue collar tradesmen trading references. There's higher dollar amounts involved and it's a different industry but it's the same behavior.
This is true for all business. People don't buy the objectively best product, they buy the product from the people they know best. Until you are capable of changing human nature and purchasing behavior challenging this phenomenon will be an uphill battle.
I dont think "hiring someone who knows the social landscape" for your sales/networking position is a flaw. You really just need to plan for this if you want to start that type of company. A company needs more than just product builders.
Broken is just your judgement. I would rather say that quite objectively, it's just the way the world works, one can play with it or try to change it, but better be sure it's not just human nature.
Buying software services from an ideologically driven consulting firm is the mistake here. The DNC is supposed to be completely neutral in this situation, so to hire former Clinton tech people is a poor decision.
The challenge there is that if you're hiring people who are a venn diagram of developer and politically active/connected, you're always going to be getting people who have some sort of history with candidates.
Maybe it's just generally a hand grenade to hire any company that does political IT. Or maybe there's an opportunity for a truly neutral company to make inroads there.
It is interesting to note how that article talks about this app being used by both Democrats and Republicans. That is likely a requirement for any neutral tech company that wants to get into the business. Even that might not be enough to shield the company from employee protests regarding their participation in political causes even indirectly. Remember that employees of nonpartisan businesses are not necessarily nonpartisan themselves.
Why does the developer have to have any political tilt to it? You're paying a contract developer to develop an app that tallys numbers together...I would pick a shop that has experience with security over any political tilt.
> Why does the developer have to have any political tilt to it?
Because they tend to be motivated, they (are assumed to) have congruent motives, and they tend to understand the landscape. They also tend to be cheaper, relatively speaking.
(These developers also tend to mostly work on campaign, rather than electoral, infrastructure, which makes them a poor fit here. I don't consider it a defensible decision by the DNC, but it's very defensible for most candidates to want to hire people who want to see them elected.)
It's an app that adds numbers together for a few thousand users.
Maybe for more complex projects this might be true, but any moderately competent developer could have built this.
I believe the Iowa DNC paid around ~$50K for this app. I have a hard time believing that isn't something any good dev shop would bid for given how simple the app is.
I agree! I was trying to explain why these shops exist and are used in the general case, while also noting that this was a bad call here.
They were probably picked, to be frank, because they're the people that the folks in charge of picking a developer already had in their rolodex. Private organizations can do RFPs, but don't have to, and if you don't fully understand how bad a software project can go sideways, it's not going to be something you care too much about.
There are roughly 1,700 precincts in Iowa give or take with one ballot each...any decent 10-key operator could have transcribed the entire caucus result by midnight last night...and they needed an app? I don't care how much they spent on it, $1 was too much.
I would tend to agree. Maybe I'm ignorant of the inner machinations of political campaigns, but it seems like it's not the type of work that requires domain experience to be effective in. But that's what we would think as IT professionals, people in political campaigns may not think that way.
And really, you see this in lots of sectors where they want developers with experience in that domain even if it's not really necessary. Or at least, nowhere near as important as being a good developer is.
>Why does the developer have to have any political tilt to it?
Everybody has a political tilt. Even somebody who doesn't vote, read the news, etc will still have opinions that are the political spectrum. Have you ever met a person (not just a developer) that doesn't have a political tilt?
Individuals make up companies/organizations so no matter what you will have a company that has somebody working on it who is not completely impartial.
> Or maybe there's an opportunity for a truly neutral company to make inroads there.
Truly neutral companies are hard to find; most companies of any proven competence have well-known political preferences, and those that don't there is going to be a concern of unknown and hostile-to-the-customer leanings, which you really don't want to discover after they've manifested.
The DNC provides funding to both state level parties. I can imagine that they may have had some level of influence over which contractor was picked. What's the point of becoming a party insider if you can't use that to get your company contracts later?
This is such a wildly uninformed take. Firstly, Clinton isn’t running this year. Why is hiring people from her campaign “not neutral”? Secondly, every single person in politics has previously worked for a bunch of different campaigns. That’s how political jobs work; campaigns only last a few months so you’re constantly hopping from one role to another. It’s not possible to hire only people who are untainted by prior association with previous campaigns.
Remind me how that worked in the last presidential primary.. I appreciate the aspirational “supposed to” comment but they don’t have a good track record of neutrality. As the problems are never dealt with, I’m not sure why expectations would be different.
> I think the DNC is anything but neutral. They seem to strongly put their thumb on the scale.
And now you see why so many non-Democrats have a fear of them getting elected. If the DNC can't give equal treatment to its own people with whom they disagree, what of the rest of the country for whom they have apparent disdain?
The problem is that there are a limited number of people in the world who have experience dealing with the kinds of problems large-scale political enterprises deal with. Many (maybe even most) of those people are going to have gained that experience by working on campaigns. So if you automatically rule out anyone who's ever worked on a campaign, you're ruling out most of the people who would know how to do the things you want to do.
A junior developer could've developed an app to count votes from 1000 precinct reporters. You don't need to hire a developer with political experience so much as security experience.
Either way, the app broke, so even a shop with "experience" here completely failed at their job.
A junior developer could've developed an app to count votes from 1000 precinct reporters.
That is exactly the kind of attitude that leads to a disastrous rollout like this. You're applying a brand-new app and process to help with complex rules changes, and now you have a new organizational problem.
As someone who has had skin in the game with keeping political web tools working, this type of thing is terrifying. Nobody should be depending on new, single-use, day-of, tools. You can't test them or train them well enough.
I have to second this. This is real time polling data that has to be counted, most developers have to put a million checks just to make sure they report polling data accurately, forget actually having to count them as actual legal votes that determine real life outcomes (propelling a presidential candidate to the forefront). Yeah, no, keep the junior developers the fuck away from something like this.
How is this "large-scale" -- I think you may be assuming this was a conventional election where everyone has to cast a vote...that's not how it works... n in this case was <2,000... I mean you could have scaled to 2000 with mysql and manage.py runserver...there's no way this issue was about scaling the app...and there's no way they needed an app to begin with.
Another observation: caucuses arguably have only one single advantage over traditional voting and that is making it incredibly hard to commit voter fraud or any type of election stealing. The public nature of the voting and tallying means that there is large group of witnesses to the results. It would take pretty brazen and easily provable fraud for someone to report numbers that didn't match the results that everyone witnessed. That plus Hanlon's razor should be enough for us to require some type of evidence beyond circumstantial connections between political operatives before we accuse someone of nefarious behavior.
> This centralization is by design: the winner of presidential primary effectively becomes "head of party" and installs their own leadership at the national committee level.
That's not really true; the winner of the general election becomes effective head of their party; a primary winner who loses the general generally has less (but significant) influence. Hillary Clinton has less control of the DNC after the 2016 election than before it (she had unusual influence before the election for a number of reasons); the reform eliminating first-ballot superdelegate voting rights was due to influence gained by the Sanders-aligned faction.
This company produces the textbanking software that the Buttigieg campaign uses. It's frustrating to watch people repeating the phrase "received money from the Buttigieg campaign" with the implication that it's a bribe when the actual situation is that both the Iowa Democratic Party and the Buttigieg campaign used the same contractor for some software.
There's a pretty clear conflict of interest between the Buttigieg work of helping his campaign and the caucus tabulating work for the DNC. There might not be actual foul play, but the reason we look to avoid conflicts of interest in things like this is that it's easier to establish a lack of conflict of interest than it is to establish a lack of foul play.
Most people working in politics have done work for a zillion other candidates and the state/national party apparatus before. That’s the nature of political work; campaigns only last a few months so people are always job hopping. If that counts as a conflict of interest than every staffer for every single candidate is guilty of a conflict of interest.
You're supporting my point. If a staffer worked for a campaign and in a role in charge of election integrity at the same time, as this firm is doing, it would indeed be considered a conflict of interest.
I think the parent's point is that if you only consider contractors/staffers who don't have conflicts of interest of this sort, your hiring pool drops to a number that is too small to be useful.
Whether or not that's true is debatable, but I think it's a compelling point.
Yeah, I guess Republicans can never use Drupal, because a lot of Democratic money went towards it. Can anyone use Windows anymore? Certainly no cloud service can ever be used.
I'm trying to find sources on it (gave up but it's out there somewhere), but as I remember the Obama campaign / digital team used a lot of Drupal and contributed to the project as well. Then after Obama became President his administration pushed Drupal pretty hard. In addition people from the administration went on to work/lobby for Acquia.
pretty sure you're right but also pretty sure people with a sound ethical worldview wouldn't be simultaneously engaged in text banking and vote counting...but then these are the people who also thought it would be funny to name their company "Shadow." The only thing more laughable is that no one in the state of Iowa apparently had a reason for concern prior to last night.
Something that nobody here has pointed out. I could maybe understand why you would think that the DNC would want to make the process slow, but Buttigieg has just as much reason as Bernie to want the Iowa Caucus to run smoothly. His campaign only existed on the hope that he would win last night, and if he doesn't create any momentum out of Iowa he is DOA for super Tuesday. Anyone making up these theories hasn't thought things all the way through, clearly.
Well, if he can claim he won and the media will run with it without any clear results, that works ok too.
Thinking all the way through here, any momentum buttigieg gathers in iowa and new hampshire will be lost is south carolina and nevada, and then bloomberg will be a factor competing for his voters on super teusday.
Buttigieg's path to the nomination is having it given to him by superdelegates if no one gets a majority.
If he claims to win and he loses he's basically fucked himself out of a political future. That would be monumentally stupid.
I understand that his chances are low regardless, but they're non-existent if he can't build a media narrative off of actually winning Iowa. That's been his plan from the start, and why he's sunk so much money into winning the state. It makes absolutely 0 sense to me that anyone thinks he would want to sabotage the caucus.
This is a conspiracy theory. Please don't amplify this disinformation. There is no proof anything this commenter is stating has anything to do with the issues in Iowa.
Are you disputing the stated facts, or just the (unstated) connection to the other issues? A conflict of interest is a conflict of interest, no matter how far it may or may not have gone.
Shadow provides peer to peer engagement software, which is being used by the Buttigieg campaign. Just because the same software is being used in Iowa doesn't mean there is a conflict of interest.
I think the standard is to avoid the appearance of a conflict, not to have plausible deniability. I think the person’s point is that it doesn’t look good, and this is the kind of scenario where _you need everything to look good_, because when shit like this happens, it erodes confidence all the more.
You are implying that the app developer, the Buttigieg campaign, former Hillary Clinton staffers, and the DNC are working together in bad faith. Along with the context of the article, you are implying that there is a connection between the aforementioned parties and declining the DHS' offer to test the app.
I've said nothing about a conspiracy. I've only said there's a clear conflict of interest, which I stand by. You shouldn't hire a developer that is ideologically driven and tilted toward certain candidates over others, and has very clear close connections with a single campaign.
You're saying that like pointing out that the Hillary people ran the development for this app is similar to anti vaccine arguments. They arent similar.
> Calling something a conspiracy theory is a new way to shame people who hold opinions that are different than your own.
Is a vastly more broad statement. All I'm pointing out is that anti-vaxx people would say the exact same thing. Answer challenges with facts and arguments, not useless bold claims.
- always test your code
- always test your code with people
- never ever succumb to the temptation to ironically name your organization no matter how funny it is to you
This kind of crap is why Bernie Sanders is so popular. It's why Trump won the 2016 election too. There is an overwhelming feeling on the part of voters that the "establishment" of the party is beholden to a small group of wealthy neoliberals (or neoconservatives on the GOP side, but there are few differences in policy between the two). Many on the left regard liberalism as a failed project, and Sanders is popular among them because he offers an alternative to neoliberalism.
The wealth inequality that accelerated after the 2007 crisis has added a class warfare aspect to national politics where one did not exist before. Trump has largely eviscerated the Republican party by playing on this, and I think we're seeing this dynamic on the Democrat side this election cycle.
I've been a liberal voter for decades, and Sanders pretty well represents what the democratic party used to be back in the day. There's genuine hunger for real change and that is the driver for Sanders, as well as the fact that he is no fair weather politician.
You can hate Hillary, but she was probably the smartest, most experienced, and best qualified for the job as a maintainer of the status quo. I think we need to go beyond the status quo, but politics is (or was) the art of compromise.
Unfortunately politics is at its core a popularity contest and people vote with their emotions rather than their brains, which is why we have the current administration.
> You can hate Hillary, but she was probably the smartest, most experienced, and best qualified for the job as a maintainer of the status quo.
No, she wasn't. She had very little of either electoral or executive experience for a Presidential candidate, but lots of experience as a less-accountable figure around politics and policy.
Whether as maintainer of the status quo or otherwise she was only modestly qualified.
Hillary Corrupt - you can search her emails and Podesta's online, which show that her foundation (from which her family drew salary and benefit) was a pay-to-play scheme demonstrated at the least by her explicitly considering donor status in her meeting calendar while Sec. (not to mention donations to her foundation falling off 95%+ the minute her influence tanked), and that the media were funneling debate questions to her ahead of the debates. That's what we know for certain during the last primary because we can read it directly in the record. Separately, when she knew her records were about to be subpoenaed she destroyed data (the 30k emails) claiming they were personal - she didn't make a claim that they were privileged or irrelevant to the matter, much less let a judge determine this - she preemptively destroyed the information. This is called spoliation of evidence and is a crime that you and I, were we stewards of a company's data, would be put on the rack for. Check your attempts at regaining cognitive consonance and consider how this speaks to her character for the average person participating in a primary against her. And BTW, at this point it's pretty disingenuous to be talking about Hillary as somebody who doesn't thrive on peddling conspiracy theories.
Yes, she was corrupt and I still voted for her because it was status quo corruption.
Her opponent has taken that to new levels and if we are to discuss this topic it requires openness to the flaws of all involved, including our preferred candidates. To not do so is to engage in partisan bickering which is not appropriate here.
> her foundation (from which her family drew salary and benefit) was a pay-to-play scheme
Citation needed about pay to play. Also, foundations pay their directors. Why is that surprising?
> the media were funneling debate questions to her
One person funneled one question to her. The Sanders campaign also said that same person helped their campaign, with one aide saying, "If Bernie Sanders had been the nominee of the party and the Russians hacked my emails instead of John [Podesta]’s, we'd be reading all these notes between Donna and I and they'd say Donna was cozying up to the Bernie campaign."
> Separately, when she knew her records were about to be subpoenaed she destroyed data (the 30k emails) claiming they were personal - she didn't make a claim that they were privileged or irrelevant to the matter, much less let a judge determine this - she preemptively destroyed the information
Again, citation needed that she did this on purpose. The person who actually did it says otherwise.
> This is called spoliation of evidence and is a crime
It would be a crime if it happened as you said, but the investigation came to the opposite conclusion.
> at this point it's pretty disingenuous to be talking about Hillary as somebody who doesn't thrive on peddling conspiracy theories.
I never said Clinton doesn't, but now that you mention it, she clearly doesn't anywhere near as much as Sanders and Trump supporters.
Please don't lump those two together. Yes, there are Sanders supporters that are "fringe", but the man himself has been clear and consistent on economics and policy his entire career.
After he lost the primaries to Clinton (a process I personally think was gamed by the DNC), he publicly supported her and encouraged his supporters to do the same.
We're discussing politics on HN and I don't want to incur dang's admonishment again. We are in very uncertain times these days so I think it's important to discuss key issues in a cogent and concise manner.
> Yes, there are Sanders supporters that are "fringe", but the man himself has been clear and consistent on economics and policy his entire career.
The key difference between Sanders and other politicians like McCain, Obama, etc. is that Sanders doesn't push against the fringe elements of his supporters, which encouraged them to grow into a large portion of his supporters.
And in particular, their emotions lead them to believe conspiracy theories when something doesn't go their way. It's not that the DNC is some cabal hindering progress, like they believe, but that progress requires careful policy consideration that those who advocate large immediate changes haven't thought through.
Look at Sanders's early education policy for example. It's just a single line. Getting early education and childcare right will benefit far more people and in a far more egalitarian way than getting postsecondary education right, but if you even suggest it, some "emotional" Sanders supporters will say you must be part of a banking conspiracy.
Conspiracies come in different flavors as it were. The DNC has not hidden its fear of Sanders, and I believe that they are "conspiring" to get a mainstream candidate that their patrons want, e.g. Biden or Buttigieg.
Platforms are not policies, they're goals. There's nothing wrong with having ambitious goals and then adjusting to reality whilst trying to implement them.
The Sanders camp clearly attracts a lot of emotional people as well, but at least they're emotional for a perceived good rather than perceived grievances -- to put a charitable spin on it :-)
Telling Sanders and Trump voters that their support is based on conspiracy theories is not a good way to win their support away from their current candidates. Not sure when it happened but at some point it became part of the collective wisdom of political wonks that the best way to win someone to your point of view is to call them stupid. Pretty sure the works/fails ratio on that is at least 1:10 and probably more like 1:100.
> Telling Sanders and Trump voters that their support is based on conspiracy theories is not a good way to win their support away from their current candidates
Nor is telling flat earthers that their beliefs are based in conspiracy theory a good way to win their support. I am not trying to win their support by that comment, as this is not the proper forum for that conversation. I am simply stating a fact.
Are you saying that people who have a problem with this conflict of interest are the equivalent of flat earthers? That's not a viable position to take.
What conflict of interest are you talking about? I'm saying that I am not trying to convert Flat Earthers or fervent Sanders/Trump supporters but merely explaining what makes them exist.
The conflict of interest is what you're calling a "conspiracy theory". It's a known fact that there is conflict of interest between the Buttigieg campaign and Acronym/Shadow. That's not a "theory", it is indeed a fact.
> It's a known fact that there is conflict of interest between the Buttigieg campaign and Acronym/Shadow. That's not a "theory", it is indeed a fact.
Citation needed. It is a known fact that Shadow is one of the few software contractors that works for cheap for Democratic candidates. The fact that Buttigieg also used them for cheap projects does not mean there is a conflict of interest, and immediately jumping to that conclusion indicates conspiracy-minded thinking.
You definitely can. AWS does it. NGP VAN does it. Every contractor that the DNC uses does it. To believe that they don't is the kind of ignorance that leads to anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and your own conspiracy theory.
There's a difference between AWS and a tiny startup, the CEO of which is married to one of the top advisors of a the Buttigeig campaign. At this point, this conversation doesn't really matter as it's been widely accepted as a conflict of interested and condemned.
I don't think that really matters, though. Even the appearance of impropriety is an unacceptable risk to the integrity of the caucus. Doubly so in a time of conspiracy theories and misinformation run rampant.
The problem isn't that people are believing the (not yet debunked) conspiracy theory. The problem is that a clear, verifiable, conflict of interest exists, this is a top public concern with really high stakes, and the app in question should have been open source.
The "rigging" possibility is just a maybe on top of that.
Reminds of people saying YouGov (being "founded by a Tory") were biased in the lead up to the election, despite that being a literal kamikaze attack on their business model.
They ended up being almost literally bang on, ironically enough.
Pandemonium and uncertainty in this situation favors the losing candidates. Would the underdogs in this fight be getting the same level of attention today if the results were clear? I do not think it was rigged, but there are many levels of deniable sabotage that have the same result. Like just purposefully doing a garbage job.
I don't necessarily think they purposefully rigged the app, but do you not think the campaign may have gotten extra training or a direct line to Shadow for support questions on how to use the app that other campaigns wouldn't have gotten?
I'm seeing on Twitter that the app interface wasn't very intuitive and officials there were confused on how to use it.
>you not think the campaign may have gotten extra training or a direct line to Shadow for support questions on how to use the app that other campaigns wouldn't have gotten?
Well other than there is no evidence of that and would that have even helped? My understanding of how the Iowa caucuses work ... what you describe would not advantage anyone. As I understand it the campaigns themselves are not reporting "I got X votes" directly.
I've not been to Iowa but I've been to some caucuses.. what you describe would not advantage anyone in my experience.
Also, what’s your source for Buttigeg’s $100K payment to the CEO of acronym? I head about $42K the buttegieg campaign paid to shadow, but that appears to be legitimate text messaging services.
It’s dirty politics to pedal conspiracy theories. I hope you can refrain around here.
(Also, I know some people in Newtown — conspiracy theories can get down right evil quickly. Be careful not to down a dark path because you don’t know where it’s going to end.)
In the pre-Trump era politicians had to at least pretend they weren't corrupt. Now that it's clear there are no consequences, I think we'll only see them get more and more brazen.
That Buttigieg pays $100,000 for software he doesn't need to cover up a bribe used to "rig" the preliminary results of the caucus? If that's the case, wouldn't it backfire horribly once the paper ballots get manually tabulated? Especially since that would probably happen around the time of the next (NH?) primary. A story like that ("Buttigieg didn't actually win in Iowa!") would totally derail any momentum (since the actual # of delegates in Iowa is fairly insignificant, about 1% of the total, my understanding is that the main value of the Iowa caucuses is to construct media narratives)
>In the pre-Trump era politicians had to at least pretend they weren't corrupt.
I guess you should let Hillary know she should not have been in control of a foundation that was receiving millions of dollars in donations from foreign leaders while she was the head of the department in charge of US foreign policy.
Most people didn't know about that. I didn't know about that until this moment. I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying there was enough of a lack of tolerance in our society for that sort of thing for discretion to even be necessary at all.
The whole country knows about Trump's most recent cronyism, and both his voters and his congress have made clear that they intend to do exactly nothing about it.
You're just peddling the probable media narrative. It's undoubtedly the worst for Bernie. He didn't get to tout his "first count" win, which would've given him a boost going into second alignment. And he would've given a victory speech which is historically equal to at least a +5 bump in the polls.
On top of all that, it seemed like Bernie Sanders had the biggest turnout (just from qualitatively observing the number of people in his corner). As it stands, I suspect foul play. I do not have evidence of this, however.
My bet is that the contractors were incompetents who were hired based on political connections, and they both 1) just finished the app within the past week, and 2) never tested it after it was officially finalized. By bet is that they tested it weeks ago, it failed, they blamed the failure on a few bugs, they eventually marked those specific bugs fixed, then just prayed after shipping it. I know I'm being too specific, but past trauma.
Major sign: Not only wasn't there a dry run before d-day, but they didn't even train the people expected to use the app on the app.
The corruption is traditional corrupt procurement (apparently connected to Buttigieg and the Clinton complex) rather than an attempt to fix the primary. Primary fixing will be done out in the open with sudden rule changes.
Incompetent is a bit harsh. I think you need to be quite good to hit a home run with a new app/system that will be rolled out at an event to lots of users.
The app's entire purpose is to allow 1700 people to type in 21 numbers, and to send those numbers to a database. I don't know how that's more than a week's work, with another month or two added to design the walkthrough.
From a technical perspective where only informed and good actors are involved, I suspect many of us could code up a working website in less than an hour. But if you look at the issues reported on at the Des Moines Register [1] it seems the job was about creating a reporting system in an environment where people are actively trying to disrupt the system, possibly some of the reporters themselves cannot be trusted. I think you'd need to sit through a few meetings with the right people before you'd even understand what was required. You've got to find tech/security people from previous campaigns to understand what the dirty tricks are that people use to f with the results for example.
Does anyone think DHS has the expertise on hand to review source code (and would it be cart blanche style)? When I think of DHS I think more of physical security measures. NSA is whom I think of when it comes to defensive cybersecurity measures.
They likely have a standby contract with someone like Accenture or Deloite for this kind of work.
The reason for putting this under the DHS rather then just outsourcing it directly is that the DHS have some kind of credible neutrality where as nobody trusts the DNC to not censor/rewrite any report they publish on their own.
Very wild guess: they did test it and maybe even stress tested it... with the phones they had in their office. Out in the field people were using different phones with various versions of the mobile OS.
Not sure if this is an Android or iOS app but either way, it's possible there was something quirky in the implementation that didn't show up on the test phones or simulator. They may have even made a poor assumption such as there always being a network connection. That would be the case in their office but not guaranteed out in rural areas especially in rural areas with a sudden convergence of lots of people with cell phones in a confined space that doesn't usually have that much device density.
From anecdote; I've seen a months old project go to internal alpha that crashed immediately because the lead developer didn't set rails to production mode.
There are many web sites where a 1700 request burst would hurt.
True, the results are on paper and presumably will be accurately counted eventually. The concern is that this fiasco was meant to occur if the DNC felt that Sanders was going to win in a landslide. Some believe this was done on purpose to rob him of any momentum this morning, and to allow for other candidates (read: actual members of the Democratic Party) to claim some sort of success as the news cycle moves forward to tonight's State of the Union, tomorrow's Senate vote, and then the NH primary.
The people who supposedly made the app are very close to the DNC (https://shadowinc.io/about). I can't even say I'm 100% buying into this theory regarding sabotage; they probably just made an app that wasn't up to the task at hand.
Every indication I've heard so far (I live in Iowa, not that it matters since this is a national story) is that it was just gross incompetence on the part of the app maker.
They repeated all morning on the radio "No interference or hacking."
Really it's just a classic case of people under-preparing and shit hitting the fan because everything didn't go 100%.
The DNC has a significant amount of influence over the state level party organizations.
There's also plenty of tinfoil hat fodder (some of it very valid) related to how connected the company that developed the app is to certain parts of the national party.
All that page claims is that one or more members of their team worked at the DNC at some point. That's not exactly persuasive evidence that the company is some kind of purpose-built DNC kamikaze cruise missile. It could just as easily mean they've got some people who worked low-level jobs at the DNC, and are now trying to leverage that connection to sound like bigger deals then they actually are.
That's not what the tweet says, the DNC did not suggest they use the app. What the DNC said is that the previous method they were going to use (online voting) could be susceptible to hacking and so wasn't acceptable. The Iowa Democratic Party then decided on another option.
There is a compelling case to be made that manipulating the reporting of results (rather than the results themselves) would be more in line with your goals of public perception and deniability.
Anyone that's worked on a system with distributed state knows data consistency can be hard, particular in situations where the system comes under load and latencies begin to increase.
You're not specifically complaining about it, but I think it's interesting that they are being criticized for not being transparent, and then being criticized based on that transparency when they are.
People having been posting the paper caucus records left and right on Twitter and elsewhere. I wouldn't be surprised at this point the internet mob could count the results if someone tried to organize it.
Edit: Apparently all those paper sheets also have PIN numbers to log into the app, so that probably is a contributing issue.
It's a little disturbing to me to see this detail featured in so many stories, because (1) DHS isn't especially qualified to review applications for security vulnerabilities, and (2) there are reasons not to insert the Republican-controlled DHS into the processes of the Iowa Democratic Party. Moreover, there's no evidence at all that security had anything to do with the failure, and lots of reasons to believe otherwise; it's not even a relevant detail.
I'm a broken record about this, but you probably don't want to work in a field where the norm is that the government checks your software engineering work, particularly for security; there is a longstanding track record of failure here.
None of this is to defend the app, which appears to have been, from conception through deployment, moronic.
> Such a test from DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency would have focused on security and not the performance issue that Wolf said was most likely responsible for the failure. Still, Wolf said this was a “concerning event” given the amount of scrutiny around elections security after Russians targeted the 2016 presidential election.
> “We don’t see any malicious cyber activity going on,” Wolf said. “No one hacked into it -- so this is more of a stress or load issue as well as a reporting issue that we’re seeing in Iowa.”
> The Iowa Democratic Party has said there was no evidence of hacking in the much-delayed results, merely human error.
DHS wouldn't be the one to do performance testing. Sure they should have had security scans but the issue at hand is not related.
You'd think that a lot of the allegations of foreign interference in the 2016 election would have been recalled in the past couple of months and the Iowa Democratic Party would have openly welcomed the DHS' security testing of the app to ensure minimal foreign meddling.
I think that the folks handling this software project screwed up plenty, but I also don't know if I'd fault them for not going anywhere near DHS. Given the way the current administration has shamelessly attempted to corrupt pretty much every institution it touches I think the political compromise of DHS is something that opposing parties should be factoring into their threat models.
Architecture, performance, and security reviews? Definitely should've happened. DHS? Ehh.
Recent history has proven out time and time again that all sorts of organizations that should know better about securing their applications and data, absolutely don't. Just look at the Equifax breach or the OPM breach for examples.
For whatever reason, many, many people in positions of leadership have a hard time properly evaluating and mitigating risk when it comes to cybersecurity. Even when it's obvious that risk can absolutely destroy their organization.
It's clearly not an overloading issue. If the outage was a couple of hours sure, maybe it's a load issue. But it's after noon on the following day and the system is still broken.
Plus, it doesn't make sense that it would be overloaded. They should have known exactly how much load to expect based on the number of caucuses held across the state. Also, Iowa isn't a populous state so the total number of datapoints is not going to be all that big. This should not have been a hard problem. The DNC is looking like a bunch of idiots this morning.
The statement was about people waiting for hours for the app to respond when they tried to upload the results, and some giving up and going to bed after it failed repeatedly.
Even the most cursory security review for a "client software communicates with server software over the public internet" type of app should include determining whether or not the app will be easy for a script kiddie who knows the app's endpoint to DOS it. At the very least they would have noted that it ran like crap when they fired up some automated testing tool and promptly bogged down the app.
My understanding is that their back end could not handle the traffic volume. That is functionally equivalent to being DOS'd. Regardless of whether or not the people making the requests want them to be served or just want to waste your resources the legitimate requests were not served. Down is down.
A DOS attack isn't exactly a good way of doing a back end stress test. You could survive that by hiding behind cloudflare or something ... still have your back end buckle with legitimate traffic.
A staged DOS is exactly how you perform a back end stress test actually. This is industry standard. It's what testers do every time we want to know when our systems give up and fall over. The key is doing it on a prod like environment before going live.
Your "legitimate traffic" for a finite population of intended users should by definition not be capable of compromising the capacity of your system to operate if you have allocated your resources correctly unless your fundamental implementation is unsound.
Any excess traffic beyond a modest multiple of your expected turnout (I.e. worst case scenario where every citizen of Iowa decides to attend the primary) would by definition be either potential tampering via fuzzing by unintended actors trying to inundate servers to drown out or frustrate your expected userbase,or the most accident/mistake prone gaggle of users ever.
Not saying that happened or that I've seen anything that says it did, I just find your assertion odd that you'd think that a staged DOS in the testing phase against your infrastructure isn't how performance testing works.
True, there's many ways to stop a DOS that can't be used to survive legitimate traffic but in any case a well rounded security test for an application that's uptime sensitive will probably determine performance bounds for the application. You kind of need to do that in order to cover your ass when the client inevitable installs it in a different kind of black box than tested it for.
Having been around DHS procurement a bit, I can only imagine what their App testing looks like. It probably only can test on certified Windows CE and Zune devices.
This thread is full of the dumbest takes imaginable.
There are no conflicts of interest beyond those in niche markets anywhere. There are a finite number of people and companies serving in this space. Multiple campaigns use the same contractors, and those contractors will advise campaigns. The conflict of interest is known and the key thing is declaring them, siloing information, and policing behavior. This happens in every startup board where a customer participates in a funding round [and gets board seats].
Also, what was DHS going to do here? This is a private organization doing a [private] caucus in a single state. We've all read the mythical man month. DHS should focus on securing the national elections, which there is ample evidence they are behind on.
Really? You're going to call out the entire rest of this thread, many posts with links to back up credible claims being made, and go with "There are a finite number of people and companies serving in this space"?
Do you honestly believe that there isn't a company that could have made the app without direct financial ties to one candidate? There are certainly a number of developers who fit that description in this very thread.
There are plenty of credible and factual claims being made here, they are just not material. Just because someone has a financial relationship doesn't mean their is malfeasance. That's why all sorts of legal documents have conflict disclosures. That's why their are legal consequences for not disclosing conflicts. A conflict is not a de facto problem, acting on that conflict is and I see no reason to believe that happened here. I don't see anyone in the Democratic party that benefits from this.
There are a million companies that could have written this app. I could have written this app. The reason I didn't is that I don't target this market, don't have domain expertise in how caucuses are run [at the level of writing an app to administer one], and have no prior work to reference in the space. I have no doubt that's the reason the vendor was selected.
I think the fact that one of the people on the ballot also paid a bunch of money to the maker of the voting software is noteworthy and an obvious conflict of interest. And I think pretending that this conflict of interest is unavoidable is intellectually dishonest.
Potential conflict of interest. Being paid for one service and being paid for another is not a conflict of interest. It's just plain how business and politics works. The potential conflict of interest comes in if the company has any incentive to sabotage one project because they could make more money off of another.
Here transparency is our resource to investigate whether these accusations are true. For instance, if there are monies not reported correctly or if there is some discrepancy between services provided and service rendered, then we would have evidence of a conflict of interest.
Did you issue him a warning as well? He started this thread by calling everyone dumb, and I have an ethical obligation to respond to that in part.
> That helps nothing; it just makes the thread even worse.
I fundamentally disagree. I appreciate the calmness of your stance, but in reality, nothing is worse than a hostile opinion that is not actively combated.
Are you actually saying the DHS couldn't have ran some script kiddie attacks to see if it was vulnerable to the most trivial of interference, which it was? Or is it just important to you for people to ignore this colossal fuck up?
Do you know if nobody did a basic pentesting with metasploit or not, or some other security audit? Was that actually the root cause of the problem? From the actual article
"Such a test from DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency would have focused on security and not the performance issue that Wolf said was most likely responsible for the failure. Still, Wolf said this was a “concerning event” given the amount of scrutiny around elections security after Russians targeted the 2016 presidential election.
“We don’t see any malicious cyber activity going on,” Wolf said. “No one hacked into it -- so this is more of a stress or load issue as well as a reporting issue that we’re seeing in Iowa.”"
I think they had a buggy app collecting caucus votes and I see people claiming it's some kind of vast conspiracy without any evidence. With all the people (metaphorically) tripping over their d*s around the world, it seems odd what kind of coverage this is getting. Particularly since (referencing my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22239685) a much more egregious issue happened in the same state's caucuses 2012 (not to mention the 2016 NV Democratic party screw up). The reasonable conclusion is caucuses are a mess and should be scrapped (which both parties are gradually doing).
The director of the DHS said that their testing would not have caught this issue. They are quoted as such in the article referenced in this submission (and I quote their statement here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22239826).
"So what? How is that a good reason to not care about it?" Yes.
"The national elections are run by the states too. That's how elections work, they are decentralized.." Yes, and the FBI, DHS, and a number of federal agencies are consulted and have resources devoted to it. DHS has a webpage describing their involvement https://www.dhs.gov/topic/election-security.
Hillary was the Democratic party nominee in the general election. Everyone in the Democratic party technical consultancy world worked for her in 2016. Just pointing this out without context is useless. How does that compare to the Democratic party in 2008, or the Republican party in 2016?
Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. The media wanted a live, reality TV-style event and didn’t get it. Last night was supposed to be huge for ad revenue and now they’re out for blood. Imagine waiting patiently for conclusive results in every state. How are they supposed to run ads if people aren’t glued to the screen?
What’s bad for the 24-hour news cycle is good for Democracy.
I'm sure they're happy enough that folks are refreshing their newsfeeds in suspense, and everybody is tripping over themselves to get a live-updated-page about results
I don't understand why this wasn't done via Google Forms instead. A bunch of sites each reporting some numbers, which are then tallied and analyzed separately. Why is a whole app infrastructure necessary?
FWIW, I've built systems using Google Forms and Sheets to organize groups of 500-1000 people. Particularly if you're propagating data across multiple sheets, you start to see errors at that point. A refresh usually clears them, but this is still less reliability than I want in my election systems.
Politicians in the United States are more similar to actors than to statesmen. The only difference between them and Hollywood is the necessity of academic credentials and perceived morality.
"This isn’t the first time in the past decade that the process has failed to produce a timely result, which in turn arguably affected what happened next (which, after all, is what makes Iowa important).
In 2012, it was the Republican caucus that was a mess. Back then, Mitt Romney was named the winner of the caucuses by eight votes — a narrow victory, yes, but still a victory for the favorite to be the Republican nominee.
Romney went on to win the New Hampshire primary comfortably, apparently winning the often-elusive double in the first two contests — he would have been the first Republican to ever win both Iowa and New Hampshire — and setting him on course to face incumbent President Barack Obama.
Except eight days after that New Hampshire win, we found Romney actually finished second in Iowa. The Iowa GOP announced, 16 days after the caucuses, that Rick Santorum had actually finished first — by 34 votes. But even that result was tinged by uncertainty"
If you read the article, I'm actually leaving out the worst details (lost votes, misallocated votes, secret votes). The same explanation applies as this one. Caucuses are an overly complicated relic and should be discontinued by all parties. This current embarrassment has recent precedent in the other major party and in that respect is respecting tradition of demonstrating the fundamental, intrinsic ridiculousness of caucuses.
After what we heard in the House Impeachment inquiries, and the general refusal of Republicans in leadership positions to disavow illegal foreign interference in US elections, why should Democrats let DHS test anything? Isn't that potentially letting malevolent bad actors access your systems? In general, why would you let an opponent that more-or-less promises to not obey laws, rules and norms access your system?
I think issues like this belie the fact that the real concern is executing on voter turnout and building alignment between different branches of the party (party leaders, grassroots leaders, primary candidates, old and new voters, etc). I think there is a real chance that exploits or misinformation might swing a district, then a state, then maybe the general election, but if it's still that close after everything that's happened over the past four years, it's not a great look for our future and to the world presently.
I think that also speaks to us engineers and startup founders, that there's not always a technical solution especially when the problem is cultural. I oftentimes go all gopher and dig dig dig into trying to find a technical solution, and it's hard for me to recognize this truth. I think if we all provided cultural solutions to cultural problems, at work and at the voting booth, we'd all be much better off. I'm slowly working towards this direction.
There's a distinction to be made here between the national party organization (i.e. the DNC) and the various state party organizations. Even if the national party gets its act together 100%, the state parties have a fair degree of independence, and the national party has a limited number of levers to force them to do things the way it would like.
In this case, the tech firm was contracting directly with the Iowa Democratic Party, not with the national DNC. So the question here wouldn't be the tech competence of the national party, but of the specific state party that let the contract.
"When a light is shining, Shadows are a constant companion. We see ourselves as building a long-term, side-by-side “Shadow” of tech infrastructure to the Democratic Party and the progressive community at large."
What about an app by some permanent federal election commission? Several countries have a Supreme Electoral Court, which is independent of political parties.
For instance, in Costa Rica (3.4 million voters) we just elected mayors nationwide and received trustworthy results within a couple of hours (reported using a party-independent app).
Caucuses are also run by the Supreme Electoral Court. Kind of an Election-as-a-service.
The party primaries are more or less independent from "real" elections. This is how the parties like it— the DNC argued in a lawsuit that they don't have any obligation to make the process fair.
Im willing to bet the real reason there is inconsistencies is that the app used an home-brewed noSQL back end with week to no protections against duplicate entries and no real data validation despite the use of smartphones, which tend to increase data entry errors over full keyboard devices.
It's likely that you have the same precient reporting in using both the app and the phone system and entries where someone is missing an zero or mistypes a 9 instead of an 8 somewhere, causing the votes cast to differ from voters present in some precients.
Now with an well designed sql schema detecting and eventually correcting this kind of data quality issues are straightforward but as this is the work of an small relatively new digital marketing agency with almost no record outside of working for the party machinery so whats the odds that this app is backed by an well designed transactional database framework rather then a quickly cobbled together nosql schema.
To make it worse this is an case where the democratic party could have demonstrated an commitment to more transparency and less centralization as there is no secrets that needs protecting and yet the Iowa democrats went down the opposite road of more centralization and less transparency in an move that's just showcasing everything that is wrong with america's political establishment.
The open democratic way to run an election like this would be for the individual districts to publish their results for 3rd party validation directly to the public when they are done caucusing instead of placing them in escrow until the incompetents at the party HQ is done calculating the way it seems to happen now.
As of now the app is likely destined for a complete rewrite with the actual tally being done the old fashioned way using calculators and spreadsheets so an DHS code-audit would just make the issue resurface at an inconvenient time when this is no longer news, as im pretty sure anyone with a clue about IT inside of the party machine knows exactly how they screwed up and prefers strange conspiracy theories to being exposed as mundane fools.
Lets forget about the politics for a moment, but I am curious. What exactly is so difficult about a vote counting app? Why is it hard? It seems like a relatively easy thing to do, but I must be missing some hidden complexities.
> What exactly is so difficult about a vote counting app?
It's not a vote counting app, it's a vote count reporting app.
And it's not particularly hard, which is why I think the tech failure angle is probably wrong and that the problem is exactly what the IDP says: the vote counts actually being reported were inconsistent which might in part be an app UX/training problem, but is probably mostly an administration-of-caucuses problem, suspicion of which from 2016 is exactly why the DNC required the additional reporting this year, so that the integrity of the process could be verified.
It wasn't just reporting the final results. They were keeping tabs on both the first and second realignments, plus delegate counts. Essentially three sets of numbers. The reason behind this is so they could report total turnout numbers, something which was not previously reported.
> The reason behind this is so they could report total turnout numbers, something which was not previously reported.
No, the reason is because multiple campaigns (who tend to have precinct captains report the first and second alignment numbers and track how they are doing internally) complained about apparent inconsistencies in the final results in 2016, so the DNC required the additional figures to be tracked and reported officially with paper trails to provide transparency and confidence in the integrity of the results.
Users could be misconfigured so that they have access to enter data for the wrong precinct or their backend could have gotten super messed up if some of their keys/ID's started to mismatch or fall out of sync due to a bug that only happens when there's a ton of people using it.
Edit: The pin numbers to log in to the app were printed on the paper sheets, and a lot of people took pictures of the sheets and posted them to social media not realizing the implication.
Would it even be vote counting? This is a caucus with people physically standing in a high school gym or something. In prior years the phoned in the results from precincts. I don't understand the need for an app.
Not only the specifications you noted, but less than 2000 people were using the app at most. It would be very interesting to see a post mortem on the infrastructure failure.
You have an app that's a critical part of the voting infrastructure for the most important caucus in the Democratic Party, and yet we don't know:
- Anything about the people who developed the app
- The source code for the app, which should be open source in my view
- Any information about the myriad of conflicts of interests that may or may not exist
Another learning lesson is that your startup can have poor or no marketing and have a non-functional product, but if you are well-connected, that's enough to close deals in certain verticals.
The RNC cancelling primaries is much worse. I'm surprised they've gotten away with it.
Iowa's Democratic Party still has a paper trail of votes. The results may be delayed but they'll at least exist.
On the other hand, GOP voters won't even get to choose who their nominee will be in certain states. Yes, I know the president will almost certainly win these primaries. But why not let people vote?
Sure, it costs money to hold the primaries, and maybe it causes embarassment to the president if he doesn't garner the vote he's expected to win.
But not holding primaries is simply utterly undemocratic.
Haha! Yeah. I remember when my local republican party put an announcement in the paper that they were going all-in on Donald Trump and would not be sending any delegates. Two days later the house voted to impeach Donald Trump.
True, but is this a meaningful distinction here? That is, the records are passing through the app, and the output is being used to declare the results. Does the point at which the flow enters the app -- poll workers vs. voters -- change the risk profile?
This would seem dumb in any previous administration, but given how the agencies have been weaponized as political cudgels, this seems like the prudent decision even if there was a big fuckup.
The last time I tried to fax some results, my confidential medical information was bounced back to the printer in my office and printed without my knowledge for my coworkers to view...
How about each district just publicly publishes its numbers anywhere they want on the internet (just make it known publicly ahead of time where each district's numbers will be published officially). The main software just gets/scrapes and aggregates the numbers. Frick... the majority of us here could bang out some scripts and everyone can compare results.
I am greatful for fuck ups like these. They are doing a lot much more good than harm.
For the public who does not read further than the headlines this increases their scepticism agains digital and online voting. Much more than any security expert opinions can ever do.
Does anyone know if they hired out of work coal miners to work on the app? After all these are the same people telling everyone to learn to code when their job gets shipped overseas. If it was just some connected tech bros from elite schools making this thing, then this outcome is quite pathetic, but if it really was 50 year old miners who did a 12 week bootcamp, I'm more likely to cut them some slack.
Those aren't "incumbents" in anything except the Democratic Party bureaucracy. I mean, I'm fine with dumping them (and, pretty much any bureaucrats in any organization), but they aren't "incumbent politicians", and you can't get rid of them with an election.
I suppose you have to be a technologist to understand how woefully misdirected your complaints are. Technology can serve for good or bad. How is this screw up comparable to the behaviour of Big Tech?
News to me. I don't find any negativity when I tell people what I do. Don't know why anyone would feel strongly about "I code things" as a career or a hobby.
Edit: Just now saw the username, sorry for feeding the troll
> “Yeah rigging the primary worked wonders for the Democrats last time,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted, invoking his father’s frequent claims in 2016 that the Democratic nominating process was rigged against Bernie Sanders.
Are we.... are we still pretending it wasn't rigged? Debbie Wasserman Schultz literally was forced to resign as DNC chair over the rigging scandal. I don't think the DNC rigging their 2016 primary is controversial or in dispute is it?
If so, framing it as "[President Trump]'s frequent claims" rather than an undisputed fact is disingenuous at best here.
Disclaimer: I consider myself center-left, not really a Democrat though, mostly independent.
From what I have read, it's strongly in dispute.
The super-delegates issue was really just a poor policy by the DNC, one that could be exploited by a strong establishment/mainstream candidate. Bernie has always been an outsider, relative to the Clintons, in that sense.
Some debate questions were provided to the Clinton campaign apparently because they had asked for them, whereas the Sanders campaign had not. In retrospect, probably not a good look, regardless of whether or not he/she asked for them. Probably should have immediately released the same questions to Sanders' campaign once Clinton's received them.
I feel like DWS was forced to resign because she was incompetent and directionless, and only got the job since she was a crony of establishment Dems who wanted a "friendly" to occupy the seat. This might also be me projecting, since I have a hunch that Republicans are better at mobilizing resources to achieve specific goals (e.g. judge appointments to courts of all levels, governorships), but I think I'm starting to digress so yeah.
This entire thread is full of conspiracy, disinformation and outright ignorance.
Such a sad state of affairs for this website. If the folks writing these terrible comments are the same folks working in this industry, perhaps the sorry state of most web software is more understandable.
Since the conspiracy and lies are permeating all but one comment in this thread, here's a short roundup of replies:
* The DNC had nothing to do with the Iowa Caucuses, which are run by the Iowa Democratic Party themselves
* Caucuses have traditionally been pretty rough to manage. I remember when Mitt Romney won Iowa, until it was reported that Ron Paul won Iowa, until we realized it was Rick Santorum who won Iowa. It's not a party thing, it's a state thing.
* Nothing about a 1/2 day delay on reporting results "hurts Bernie", in fact, smart analysis is that it helps him and his narrative based campaign (just look at the comments here!)
* The people who conduct these operations are Iowa democrats, who appear to support Bernie more than anyone. So, the claim of many conspiratorial comments here is that "Bernie supporters are rigging Iowa to hurt Bernie". Disinformation doesn't really make sense when you actually follow the threads and write it out plainly!
This is the time when Democrats are most likely to engage in aggressive infighting, and also the worst possible time for them to do so.
Even if you're very spirited in your support for your candidate, it's important to do your best to be accurate and careful in your response to your fellow party members.
What if you're an independent caucusing for one Democrat and don't care about the others? There are many on Sanders' side doing just that and it's unfair to tell them that they're bad for being skeptical of the cancellation of the most important poll and delaying the results of an election that would've gave Sanders tremendous media coverage and a bump in the polls
> What if you're an independent caucusing for one Democrat and don't care about the others?
You have a poor understanding of the American electoral process and should re-evaluate your stance in it if your goal is to affect change.
> ...unfair to tell them that they're bad for being skeptical of the cancellation of the most important poll and delaying the results...
I'm not saying they shouldn't be skeptical, I'm saying it is wrong to attack other democrats without evidence and point fingers at other candidates because you're upset that Iowa had a poorly run caucus.
I would also caution against assuming the outcome of any poll or caucus, most of all Iowa which is a tremendously difficult caucus to interpret.
I'm only telling you that they exist. 34% of Sanders voters "may not" vote for another blue candidate. 10% voted for Trump. This isn't my opinion. This is just data.
Finally, someone who acknowledges that the Democratic establishment isn't trying to suppress Bernie and that there were simply technical difficulties. This whole conspiracy narrative builds distrust and helps no one but the Trump campaign.
