The primary elections that will decide which candidates will enter the US presidential race began on February 3 and the state of Iowa was the first to go to the polls. However, a flaw in the smartphone application designed to count the votes has thrown chaos, leading to the postponement of the announcement of the Democratic Party's results.
It should be remembered that in Iowa primary schools are organized in caucuses, that is, a personal election in, for example, schools, pavilions or community centers. In all, there are 1,700 polling stations in the state, and to vote, voters join others who support the same candidate taking a particular position in the space in question.
To facilitate the counting by the polling station organization, representatives of the Democratic party in Iowa have chosen to use a smartphone application. Contrary to expectations, several problems arose that ended up causing a delay in the dissemination of results. The organization's members, for example, faced difficulties opening the application or even installing it, says Bloomberg.
Inconsistencies were found in the communication of three sets of results, said Mandy McClure, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Party in Iowa, the international press. To ensure the dissemination of reliable data, the organization is using more traditional methods to count the votes. According to the spokeswoman, the failure in the application is not an interference by hackers.
In January, Democratic party representatives in Iowa had made it known that they would use the application to help count votes and disseminate results, even in the face of the possibility of hacker attacks or interference from other countries, as in the case of presidential elections. 2016. According to the NPR, the application used raises several security issues, since very little is known about it, including who created it.
