For a process that plays such a major role in determining the future leader of the world's most powerful country, the Iowa Caucuses can seem archaic, opaque, and hard to understand. But this year, thanks to mobile tech and social media, they're about to become more open and transparent---an evolution that could also play an outsized role in influencing the outcome of the nation's first presidential contest.
Back during the 2008 Iowa Caucus, Rachel Paine Caufield says she had never even heard about Twitter. The platform was not quite two years old and hadn’t yet broken into the mainstream. But that year, a friend came to town to observe the proceedings and told Caufield this new tool had the power to radically change the process.
At the time, Caufield, a professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines, thought her friend was crazy. Today she believes her friend was prophetic.
On caucus night, Iowans don't just cast votes. Instead, the Iowa Caucus is a low-tech, no-frills event where neighbors gather in schools, community centers, and each other’s homes to voice their opinions on candidates seeking the party’s nomination. It’s the way it’s been done since Iowa gained its "first in the nation" status in 1972. Four years have passed since the last Republican caucus, and eight years have gone by since the Democrats have had to choose a nominee. That, of course, was before most Americans had a smartphone permanently affixed to their palms. This year, when Iowans gather to caucus on February 1st, all that will change.
“We all have smartphones, and we not only tweet regularly, but we have Instagram and YouTube and video cameras in our pockets,” she says. “This will be a caucus that’s documented in a way no previous caucus has been documented.”
We can't blame you if your eyes glaze over at the mention of the mechanics of the American electoral process. But when you understand how the weird and wonderful world of the Iowa caucus operates, it's actually fascinating. So, here's your crash course.
The Republican caucus is straightforward. Iowans come together in their precincts and cast votes privately. The votes are tallied, and everyone heads home. The Republican party uses those tallies to determine how many delegates each candidate receives at the party's nominating convention in July.
The Democratic caucus is a whole different story. Iowans gather in their precincts, but instead of casting a secret ballot, they divide the room into sections for each candidate. Each person then stands in their favored candidate's corner. That’s when the fun starts.
For the next 30 minutes, caucus-goers in every corner scramble to convince their friends, family, and neighbors standing in other groups to join their own. They’re free to beg, bargain, and cajole people into changing their votes before the final tally is taken. Free cookies and T-shirts have been known to change hands in moments of desperation.
"It's a weird parallel universe where stuff that would never fly in any other aspect of politics all of a sudden becomes really normal," says Crystal Patterson, who worked on Hillary Clinton's 2008 digital team before becoming Facebook's manager of politics and government outreach.
The trick is, every group must have a minimum number of participants to be considered viable. If after 30 minutes, a group still isn't viable, members of that group must realign, and the bargaining begins anew before the final count. Then those numbers are run through a simple math formula to determine how many delegates each candidate will receive.
Still with me?
The whole ordeal can take quite a while. That's why, Caufield says, Twitter stands to play an important role, because it will make it much easier for caucus-goers to see how their candidates are faring in other districts. That’s important, since research shows that the more voters know about a candidate’s broad popularity, the more they're swayed to join the majority.
"Our voting calculations in our own heads change depending on which candidates are doing well," she says, "We’re going to have a lot more information about that this time around."
While Twitter may help caucus-goers gain a clearer understanding of the wheeling and dealing occurring elsewhere in the state, Twitter's head of news, government and elections Adam Sharp predicts the platform also will help people finally understand what goes on in Iowa.
"The fair weather supporters of the candidates, hoping their neighbors speak for them, will now have more visibility to see and understand how critical their vote is when they are getting those real time reports," Sharp says, adding that that's especially true of Periscope, Twitter's live-stream app.
This also is the first year that both parties will use tech tools to help manage the messy caucus process, which has led to egregious reporting errors in the past. Back in 2012, a series of reporting inaccuracies and missing reports from eight precincts led Republican leadership to mistakenly declare that Mitt Romney won the Republican caucus. Two weeks later, they announced that Rick Santorum won.
Both parties hope a reporting app built by Microsoft will help sidestep a similar embarrassment. Precinct captains, who are the only ones authorized to use the app, will use it to enter the total number of caucus participants and how many participants vote for each candidate. For Democrats, the app also calculates how many members a group must have to be viable.
The app also monitors for inconsistencies in the data. If the numbers don't add up---if reports from some precincts go missing, for example, or if one precinct reports a suspicious number of participants---that information would be flagged. Once all the data is validated, each precinct can send the final count to party leaders in Des Moines.
The benefit of having a company as large and established as Microsoft running the technology is it can easily deal with scale. The bigger challenge, says Stan Freck, Microsoft's senior director for campaigns and elections, is making sure that people know how to use it come Caucus night. "It's not about managing the load per se," he says. "It's more about, are people comfortable and able to use the system effectively?"
Both the Republicans and Democrats have been holding training sessions statewide to acclimate precinct captains. Meanwhile, Democrats are trying out a not-so-newfangled tool of their own: touch-tone phones. For the first time in caucus history, the Democratic party is hosting a so-called tele-caucus, in which students and members of the military stationed beyond Iowa can caucus by phone.
But campaigns aren't leaving it all up to the parties. Many of them are also building caucus tools. The Bernie Sanders campaign, for one, has built an app that will help precinct captains track how preference groups change over the course of the night. The app will not only serve as a check against the Microsoft tool, but it will also provide the campaign with potentially important data to use later on.
"If we did well in districts where there was a candidate who didn’t get viability, and we’re able to peel those people off, we’ll be able to surface that information in real time," says Pinky Weitzman, Sanders' Iowa digital director.
Still, while caucus night may be when the final decisions get made, most campaign staffers agree that it's what they do in the days and months leading up to that night that really matters. Yes, Facebook, Twitter, and other tech platforms can help boost turnout and educate people about the process---and the candidate. But what makes the Iowa Caucus so difficult for outsiders to understand is how heavily it depends on real, human relationships.
When the privacy of the ballot box and the polling station are stripped away, and members of the same, often small, communities are forced to look one another in the eyes and cast their votes out in the open, there's no technological substitute for knowing that the majority of those people in the room are true believers who will fight to get your candidate elected.
"At the end of the day," says Weitzman, "these are Iowans talking to other Iowans, and there's no better advocate than those people.
