It is currently 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb 4.

The Iowa Democratic primary happened yesterday.

Most caucuses were wrapped up by 10 p.m.

If this was a normal election year, we would have gotten election results last night.

If not last night, then early this morning.

Yet, here we are, with less than 2% of precincts reporting as of the time of writing.

How did this happen?

The long and short of it is that the Iowa Democratic Party tried using a new app to record election results.

Said app bugged out and crashed when the time came to record the results.

As a result, beyond the few initial results lucky enough to get through before things came crashing down, no results have been recorded for the past 20 or so hours.

People have been justifiably pretty upset about this, including myself.

First though, I have to clear the air on a few things.

For one, it’s not been the DNC running this mess.

This is largely on the head of Iowa Democratic Party, who holds onto the outdated caucus election model and insisted on trying out this new technology during a vital election.

The DNC didn’t get involved until late on Tuesday.

Also, and I’m saying this as a Bernie supporter, this is probably not a scheme to undermine Sanders.

I know it’s tempting to ascribe this to a conspiracy to undermine Bernie, but that’s probably not what’s happening here.

If anything, a delay like this will probably hurt Buttigieg, as he’s really relying on the momentum from a big Iowa win and the ensuing positive news cycle to carry him towards the nomination.

No, what’s happening here is, in all likelihood, just general incompetence.

But really, that just makes this all the more baffling to me.

If this was a conspiracy, it would make sense in some twisted, Machiavellian way.

Instead, we’re left with what is likely the depressing truth.

That truth being, the Iowa Democratic Party relied on an untested app from a startup tech company to run what is literally the second most important election of the year.

However, I can’t blame people for being suspicious.

The DNC infamously favored Hillary over Bernie during 2016.

While the claims that they rigged the primary against him are overblown (the DNC literally does not have the power to control state elections, so they couldn’t rig it even if they wanted to), they absolutely did favor Hillary over Bernie.

They spread negative news stories about Bernie, tried to plant people at his rallies to ask loaded questions regarding his faith and talked about how to slow his campaign in leaked emails.

This all coming from an entity that is supposed to be impartial, reflecting merely the whim of the voters.

Beyond that, the app used for this election was made by a company literally named Shadow Inc., and that company is staffed by ex-Hillary staffers and Buttigieg campaigners.

Yes, they did in fact name it “Shadow Inc.”

Yet, as was stated earlier, until late yesterday the DNC had very little to do with this latest mess.

It’s on the Iowa Democratic Party, who actually controlled how this caucus was handled.

If you want to be upset at someone, be upset at whoever it was in Iowa who decided to modernize what didn’t need to be modernized.

Paper ballots work fine.

They’re probably the ideal method for counting votes.

They cannot be interfered with electronically, they have a paper trail, and they ensure that someone is physically there at the booth, casting a ballot.

I honestly feel terrible for all of the staffers and workers who worked for months trying to make this election a smooth reality, only to have their work undermined by someone thinking their app is the new bright future for elections.

I can only hope that people learn the proper lesson from this mess, that just because you can technologically innovate a process, that doesn’t mean you actually should.

Nevada democrats have actually taken note of this.

Before this mess, they were going to use the same app that caused this whole thing in Iowa.

They’re not going to be doing that now, thank the Lord.

Democrats, now more than ever, can’t afford to waste time and energy on completely needless disasters such as this.