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.
