Culture

A Virtual Threat to Iowa’s First-in-the-Nation Caucuses


In August of 2018, the Democratic National Committee enacted reforms to make its Presidential-nomination process more inclusive. Perhaps the most drastic of the new rules was a mandate for all states to support some form of electoral participation that wouldn’t require attending a polling station in person. In primary states, absentee ballots have long served this purpose. The target of the D.N.C.’s mandate, it seemed, was caucus states, where, rather than cast private votes, supporters broadcast their choices during jostling, chaotic, party-run affairs that hinge on hours of horse-trading between rival campaigns. In Iowa, whose signature caucuses have for decades occupied the earliest slot in the nation’s nominating process, critics tend to point out that the system effectively disenfranchises those who, for whatever reason, are unable to show up. “You know, there were a lot of people who couldn’t caucus tonight, despite the very large turnout,” Hillary Clinton said, more than a decade ago, on the night she lost the 2008 caucus to Barack Obama. “There are a lot of people who work at night, people who are on their feet, people who are taking care of patients in a hospital, or waiting on a table in a restaurant, or maybe in a patrol car, keeping our streets safe.”

The D.N.C.’s policy was designed to encourage caucus states to accommodate more participants, but the effect has largely been to persuade many of them to adopt primaries instead. Following the announcement, nine states that conducted caucuses in 2016—Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, Utah, and Washington—switched their nominating processes. Among the states planning to stick to a caucus system, Iowa and Nevada have attracted the most attention, largely because their early spots on the nominating calendar make them bellwethers of national success. In February, the Iowa Democratic Party announced plans to début a series of “virtual” caucuses, which would have allowed voters to register their preferences during scheduled phone sessions. The plan had secured conditional approval earlier in the year, and, as of last week, the I.D.P. had been awaiting formal approval by a deadline set for September 13th. Late last week, though, during a closed-door meeting of the D.N.C.’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, in San Francisco, some members raised concerns about the security of the system, citing its vulnerability to hackers. On Friday, the D.N.C. rejected the state’s proposal, concluding that the existing technology posed too large a risk of interference from foreign adversaries.

The decision seemed to jeopardize both the fate of the virtual system and, in theory, Iowa’s claim to the nation’s earliest nominating contest. In New Hampshire, which holds the first primary, a law entitles the secretary of state to change the date of that election so that it precedes any other primary by at least a week. If Iowa’s new plan to accommodate the D.N.C.’s inclusivity mandate causes its nominating contest to deviate too far from the form of a caucus—if, in effect, it becomes a primary to comply with the D.N.C.’s terms—then Iowa’s coveted first-in-the-nation berth might well be at risk. “Iowa would become just another state,” Rachel Paine Caufield, a political scientist at Drake University who studies the caucuses, told me. “It’s hard to envision a world where Iowa wouldn’t go first in 2020, because so many candidates have invested so much here. There’s an expectation that that investment is important and worthwhile. They’re playing by the rules as they have understood them.” (In February, the Des Moines Register predicted that Iowa will have hosted more than two thousand Presidential events before caucus night.)

The Iowa caucuses are as much a political procedure as an intimate neighborhood affair. Attendees bring drinks and cupcakes to precinct locations, where they barter, argue, and shuttle between corners of a room to declare their support for individual candidates. During “realignment periods,” supporters of candidates whose crowds don’t meet so-called viability thresholds are beseeched to join rival camps instead. For many Iowans, this process is a source of pride. Caufield, who moved to the state in 2001, recalled her first caucus as the “most amazing political experience” of her life. “There’s a cultural ethos around the caucuses,” Caufield said. “It’s person to person. It’s open conversation. It’s negotiation and bargaining. There are very few venues in American life anymore where we have these conversations—eager and in good faith. It’s reassuring to me that that still exists.”

For others, the system represents an obstacle to political involvement that even the virtual offering did not promise to amend. Jane Hudson, the executive director of Disability Rights Iowa, told me earlier this week that Democratic Party officials had yet to address accessibility concerns voiced by her organization. For months, she and her colleagues had proposed usability testing, offering their own resources to insure that any virtual system would accommodate Iowans with disabilities. (There are more than three hundred thousand people with disabilities in the state, a figure that exceeds even the record-breaking caucus turnout in 2008, when two hundred and forty thousand Iowans—less than ten per cent of the population—participated.) Though officials from the state party met with representatives from Disability Rights Iowa in June, according to Hudson, they did not follow up afterward or respond to more recent letters sent by her staff. “We’ve tried to work with them for six months,” Hudson told me. “We met with them personally. But they’re still dragging their feet.” (The party did not respond to a request for comment.)

Other aspects of the virtual caucus remained uncertain, too. In Iowa’s physical precincts, the number of delegates allotted to each caucus depends both on population and on prior party support in a given precinct. For the virtual caucus, to which the I.D.P. had assigned ten per cent of the state’s delegates, the population is impossible to predict, in part, because prior participation is nonexistent. (In 2016, ten per cent would have allowed an ample window for Bernie Sanders to surpass Hillary Clinton, who had beaten him by less than three-tenths of a point.) One poll, from February, suggested that the virtual caucus could expand statewide participation by nearly a third. A more recent follow-up, in June, revealed that, whereas two-thirds of those who planned to attend in person indicated that they would definitely attend, only a third of the caucusgoers likely to opt for the virtual system expressed similar enthusiasm. The poll also found that the virtual caucuses would bring in younger, more moderate, and less politically experienced Iowans.

Caufield attributes much of the state party’s difficulty to the logistical nightmare of overhauling the existing system. “Caucuses, by their very nature, are not run by the state,” she said. “They’re run by the party. So all of a sudden the party has to adopt a lot of the logistical roles that the secretary of state’s office plays. They have to figure out who voted early and who didn’t. They have to find some way to validate people’s identity when they’re participating virtually. The party doesn’t have the capacity, necessarily, to do that, because they’ve never had to do it before. The irony of all of this is that the least hackable system on earth is an in-person caucus.”

On Friday, the New York Times reported that the D.N.C. “would recommend exemptions to Iowa and Nevada that would allow them to avoid new guidelines requiring caucus states to allow remote participation without attending a caucus event.” At a press conference earlier in the day, at the organization’s headquarters, Troy Price, the I.D.P.’s chair, acknowledged that a waiver “was a possibility,” but added, “No one has said to me that we have to have a waiver.” Price, who looked flushed, reassured the audience that Iowa would continue to hold a caucus, and that its caucus would be first. (Tom Perez, the chair of the D.N.C., had told him as much on a phone call that morning, Price said.) “We are still committed to making sure that this process is as accessible as possible, to making sure that this process is as transparent as possible, and to making sure that our caucuses are a tremendous success,” Price said. “I know you folks want to have a lot of conversations about what exactly that’s gonna look like. The thing is, we just don’t know yet. We’re taking this news just like everyone else. We are working to see what options are available to us in the time we have left.”



READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.