Iowa Caucus, Error Analysis, The Blob

Topics: Iowa Caucus, Error Analysis, The Blob
Quote: the DNC has now stated in a court of law is that it believes that there is no enforceable obligation to run the primary elections of this country's democracy in a fair and impartial manner. - Jared H. Beck, Carola Wilding v. DNC (2016)
Image: 1963, Bernie Sanders at a Civil Rights Protest
Soundtrack: Killing In The Name - Rage Against The Machine  

In my last correspondence, I mentioned how vital Iowa Caucuses are in the political process. That whoever wins Iowa tends to go on to win the primary. It turns out my phrasing was a little off; It's about whoever controls the narrative, which typically is the winner; With no precincts officially reporting by Prime Time Monday, Billionaire backed Pete, a former finance intelligence officer, delivered a victory speech.

Iowa, a state that is 90% white and bans ex-felons from voting, holds caucuses. Caucuses, initially meetings between [party leaders | upper-class], were then later expanded to let the middle class, has been mostly successful, albeit exclusionary, practice for the at least the last 255 years of American history. They are much older than either of our current parties.

Going into Monday, polling and political forecasting described as a Biden and Sanders going head to head. Entrance interviews show that people are playing closer to who they believe can beat Trump than on the nuance of issues. 

Fear-based voting detracts from the efficacy of a system designed to run with the discussion of issues. Informed from reporting, built from the same inaccurate polling data and political tradition as the rest of the system, talk of electability becomes a distraction used to drive people to candidates, like Biden, who think they are owed the white house.

As soon as a slightly more diverse group of people were put in a room and allowed to talk to each other, Joe "Electable" Biden became an unviable candidate with fewer than 15% of participants during the first round of caucusing in many precincts, thereby allowing these caucus-goers to realign.

Caucuses, as a ranked vote system, are allowed to express the nuances of optimistic selection rather than defaulting to the pact of fear voting we see during the general election. A process where the illusion of choice so forced, that parenting books could use it as a guide to getting toddlers to put on their shoes.

Then as it was time to start reporting the results, Iowans turned to use a brand new mobile App, that immediately started showing significant bugs. Developed by a for-profit company called Shadow Inc, and staffed by Hilary supporters, Shadow is part of the democratic Blob and owned by a non-profit [news | propaganda] apparatus named ACRONYM. Personally, the naming convention is a little too on the nose for my taste.

With an understaffed and underfunded team put in place to develop an insecure app for a process that would be better served by a fax machine; The ability for the Iowa Democrats to manage a several hundred-year-old processes ground to a halt.

As of Prime Time Monday, the candidates started making their speeches, without public comment from Iowa as to the results, Pete, a former intelligence officer, would go on stage to strongly suggest a win at Iowa, which was later clarified. In the morning, Bernie's team would release their internal numbers telling the story of their victory. 

It's wasn't until just before prime time Tuesday night that Iowa released only 62% of the results, showing Pete leading by less than the margin of error on New York Times's forecasting. Over the coming days, numbers would trickle out, only to be caught with errors by supervisors, forcing correction by the party. At 99% reported, and numerous identifiable errors, the NYT freezes their page to show Pete at a victorious 0.1% lead and a small disclaimer about inaccuracy.

The absolute truth about the Iowa results is gone, but then again, any process involving humans is bound to have mistakes. To be tired and stressed as you play a game of telephone copy numbers down into row after row of data, only to go over the numbers again and again in a series of quality control checks. To err is human.

Surface Area by SDE speaks to risk as space across the process as a function scaled by score, a more accurate method might look opportunistically in the direction of a relationship to non zero cells in the sheet of record.

With Biden, Buttigieg, and Warren erroring at comparable rates relative to estimated risk, Bernie, as the notable outlier is affected 2.25 times more by errors than the field of candidates, seemingly not in step with risk. Steyer's smaller mass led to errors having an outsized impact.

Looking at both what Bernie's party collected and the independent community error correction on Iowa party data and NYT's forecasts put Bernie as the winner. Now that the world has moved on, the Blob's own Chairman Tom Perez suggests a recanvass of Iowa caucus results.

We're gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we're gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have -- and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we're gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That's not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right, and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party politics to answer those questions. - DNC Attoney, Bruce V. Spiva (2016)

Processes of engagement are built on trust, and anything that dismantles confidence pushes people away. Iowa is more likely to push away people who distrust the system and align with Bernie or Warren, then people who are more aligned with the continuation of the traditions of Pete or Biden.

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