I watched the Iowa Caucus on MSNBC for a couple of hours last night, then went to bed before the speeches. I have to say that I was dismayed and depressed by what I saw even before it was revealed that the results were gummed up in technological glitches.

One caucus-goer after another was interviewed, and one after another proclaimed they were basing their vote on “electability.” In other words, their decisions often were based on the near-endless propaganda that we must choose a nominee that conservative white people will vote for. Never mind the rather poor track record of past “electable” Democratic nominees (example).

One more time, people — we don’t know who is “electable” until there is an election. The pundits don’t know. Senior Democratic Party officials don’t know. Nobody knows. All they have are theories, and the theories have been proved wrong in the past. From now on, let’s do something crazy and vote for the person we think would make the best POTUS. The result would, at least, be a reflection of what we actually want and not what we’re told we have to settle for. Whoever gets the most votes really ought to be electable.

Even so, it appears Biden really flopped in Iowa, so perhaps he’s less “electable” than he used to be.

Also, although I’d read about how the caucuses are run, I’d never before seen how screwy they are. For example, this is from one high school gym last night:

I am told the math is accurate; I have no way to know. Arithmetic to me is akin to witchcraft and the work of the devil. But this is self-evidently screwy. The rounding is distorted because of the small number of delegates (someone suggested cutting the delegates into smaller pieces to make the total more representative of the vote). Multiply that distortion by the number of caucus venues, and you get a very distorted statewide result. They should allocate delegates by statewide totals, IMO. But nobody listens to me.

I was also watching people who came to caucus for “non-viable” candidates who switched sides based on which “viable” group was having the most fun or where their friends were going. Again, this is a distortion that doesn’t reflect, as a rule, what happens in a voting booth.

It would be a lovely experiment to hold both a primary and a caucus in Iowa to see if both procedures gave us the same result. I bet they would not.

Caucuses are notoriously non-representative because they are intimidating and confusing and require people to spend at least a couple of hours, probably more, hanging out in the venue. People with disabilities complain they can’t manage them. People who need babysitters or who have night jobs can’t go. People who are likely to vote in the general but who don’t have really strong feelings about any one candidate may not bother. Turnout at caucuses generally is much, much lower than turnout in primaries. I understand that caucus participation usually reflects fewer than 10 percent of voters.

There is weeping and wailing today because there was not a record turnout last night. There were many predictions of a new record, but I understand turnout was about the same as in 2016 (that’s what they’re saying so far). The all-time record turnout was 2008, when people pumped up about Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards (yeah, remember him?) caucused in relatively vast numbers. Whether this year’s turnout means anything, I do not know. It might just mean that many potential caucus-goers didn’t have any one favorite candidate and decided not to bother.

Now, on to the technical glitches. Here is a detailed explanation at Vox. In brief, in addition to proposing to report more data than in the past, the Iowa Dem party decided that all this data would be reported through a new, untested, app. Those who didn’t want to use the app were supposed to report numbers by phone.

According to the New York Times, many precinct chairs didn’t use the app at all, citing difficulty downloading or using it. These volunteers said they had always preferred to call in the results as they had in the past, and that’s what many of them tried to do when the app wasn’t working. Many reported that phone lines at party headquarters were busy for hours, as potentially hundreds of volunteers from more than 1,600 precincts tried calling in their results.

It’s unclear so far why the phone center had so much trouble responding to the calls. Some precinct chairs even tried taking photos of their results and hand-delivering them to Iowa Democratic Party headquarters in Des Moines, and even then they weren’t able to get through to party officials.

Somewhere last night I saw a comment that caucuses should not be run by the state parties but by the state election commission. I don’t know if that would necessarily be any better, though.  From the New York Times:

For the third consecutive presidential cycle, the results here are riddled with questions, if not doubt. First it was the Republicans, when Mitt Romney was initially declared the winner in 2012 before that was later reversed, and then the Democrats suffered when a virtual tie between Hillary Clinton and Mr. Sanders in 2016 set off a number of rule changes that culminated in the 2020 debacle.

There is a paper record, I understand, so they ought to be able to sort the votes eventually. But I’m leaning in the direction of Paul Waldman, who writes that it’s time to kill the Iowa Caucus. And the rest of the caucuses also.