We’ve conditioned ourselves to expect instant gratification in all things these days.
Our food must be fast, we must have all our TV shows immediately at hand at all times, and download speeds must be lightning-quick, or else the ISP will hear about it lickety-split.
So it was entertaining to see the disbelieving reactions from American political junkies to the debacle that played out in Iowa on Monday night.
That was the night they all wait for, the night every four years when the U.S. presidential election season is launched through the strange-to-us system of caucuses and primaries that American parties use for picking its presidential nominees.
The Democrats’ crowded field needs winnowing, and the town halls and church basements of the otherwise unnoticed midwestern state of Iowa is where that process gets serious.
However, Iowa Democrats decided that a new smartphone app should play a part in the voting, and that didn’t work as advertised.
So thousands of journalists, observers, party workers and Iowans poised excitedly for the first real political results of the campaign were left without numbers to crunch, punditry to parse and lower-ballot candidates to dismiss.
For 24 hours or so, that is. The results dribbled in on Tuesday and the campaign madness resumed as usual. For the record, 38-year-old Pete Buttigieg held a slight lead in early returns over Bernie Sanders, 78, the firebrand socialist senator from Vermont. Establishment favourite Joe Biden languished in fourth.
Organizers say the new app was not hacked, but problems arose because not all party staff were trained on it, the app was difficult to upload and some reporting sites had poor Internet connections. Many workers gave up trying to report by phone after being on hold for hours and decided to wait until morning.
It hardly inspires confidence at a time when U.S. elections need solid, believable results more than ever. In the end, Iowa Democrats counted the results on backup paper ballots by hand.
Canadian parties have experimented with electronic voting for picking their leaders, and so far the results have not been encouraging either. General elections here thankfully stick with tried-and-true methods.
Paper ballots might be old-school, but they can’t be hacked and they don’t depend on bug-prone software. You don’t need a high-speed Internet connection to transmit results or a scanner to count the votes.
You just hand it to a voter, who goes behind a cardboard screen and uses a pencil to mark an X in a box. Then you put actual humans in a secure room and count by hand.
It’s low-tech but dependable and it works just fine.
