 So, even though it seems like this happened years ago, the Iowa Caucus debacle actually took place this year. In February. Yeah. Now, as to why the Iowa Caucus turned out to be a dumpster fire, we never really got answers until now. There were some really shady connections between Pete Buttigieg and the developers of the app who also came from Hillary Clinton's former campaign. We don't necessarily know if the Iowa State Democratic Party was involved in making this the shit show that it was. We don't know if the DNC, the national party organization, had anything to do with it. But what we do know is that the Iowa debacle was embarrassing and we should have had results on that night. But now we have some answers. And a State Democratic Party audit has found that the lowest common denominator is the DNC. They're responsible for Iowa being what it was. So as Tyler Peggrift political reports, Democratic National Committee meddling combined with missteps by the State Democratic Party were the primary drivers of the chaos that torpedoed the Iowa caucuses earlier this year, according to a new audit commissioned by the State Party. The report, which was distributed to the Iowa Democratic Party State Central Committee at a meeting Saturday morning and obtained by Politico identified a series of errors made by the DNC, IDP and the technology company contracted by the State Party to build a reporting app to collect caucus results. The February caucuses were overrun by foul ups. The State Party was unable to report a winner on caucus night. The mobile app to report results failed to work for many precinct chairs. The backup telephone systems were jammed and some precincts had initial reporting errors. The State Party chair Troy Price resigned in the wake of the debacle, which put Iowa status as the first in the nation nominating contest in serious jeopardy. But the report pins blame squarely on the DNC for the heart of the problem on caucus night. The delay in the reporting of the results. According to the report, the DNC demanded the technology company, Shadow, build a conversion tool just weeks before the caucuses to allow the DNC to have real-time access to the raw numbers because the National Party feared the app would miscalculate results. The DNC's data system used a different database format than Shadow's reporting app, which caused multiple problems. The audit states the conversion tool had coding errors that spit out inaccurate numbers and caused confusion about the accuracy of the results, eventually leading to delays in reporting. But the State Party's app never malfunctioned nor was hacked, the report concludes. The audit was conducted by Bonnie Campbell, the former attorney general of Iowa and Thager Drinker, an international law firm. The team conducted dozens of interviews with top IDP staffers, employees of Shadow and representatives from the Joe Biden Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg campaigns. The DNC refused to participate in interviews by the lawyers who conducted the audit. Now I know that you're thinking, why does this matter now? It matters a lot because if we don't have this information, then how can we correct these problems going forward? How can we ensure that this doesn't happen again? And let me just say that it's super convenient to find this out now when the Democratic Party and the general election is over, but I don't care how long it takes. We got the information, we know who the culprit was. Now will we see accountability? Is Tom Perez going to step down because under his watch, the DNC ruined the first caucus in the entire cycle? Like will he step down? Will anyone get fired because of this? Who made the decisions? Are they going to be penalized? I mean, these are all questions that I'm asking, but they're rhetorical questions because we know that there's going to be no accountability. The DNC continues to mess up their own primary races and nothing happens. These same individuals who were in charge, they just get shuffled around and somebody else who's going to make the same exact bad decisions is going to take their place. So, you know, we get this information. It's helpful. I think that it's really easy to see now why it was the shit show that it was because if you make these last minute changes, of course, there's going to be issues. But what are we going to do about it? That's the question. Is this going to yield any sort of accountability whatsoever? And I say this full well knowing nothing's going to happen. I mean, we have the information, what we do with it. I mean, it's up to us, but nothing's going to happen. Nobody's going to be fired. Nobody's going to be penalized for this. Are we even going to take the precautions necessary to make sure that this doesn't happen again? Probably not. And that's what really makes this frustrating, right? Because this absolutely, you know, I don't think that if Iowa went a different way, it would have changed the outcome. But could it potentially, you know, in the future hurt a leftist candidate who maybe gets that boost from Iowa or any candidate who gets a boost from Iowa, which is usually what happens? Sure. So, you know, we rely on them to just do the basic thing, the bare minimum that is expected of people who control elections. You give us the vote totals. That's what we're looking for. And if it takes time, then we're fine with that. Just let us know in advance. Don't leave us hanging like that's why this was such a debacle is because we didn't even know like we were expecting results on election night. We didn't get the results. We were told that the DNC was doing a quality assurance check or something like that, which turned out to be a lie. And then they released some of the results like 45% of precincts. And then they released a little bit more. They refused to tell us when we'd get more results. So all of this is embarrassing. And even if Democrats won this election, at least when it comes to the executive branch, it still hurts the party's legitimacy and credibility overall. So you'd think they'd want to do something like fire someone, even if they pick a scapegoat just like prove to us that they care, and they're taking this seriously, but they won't even do that. They won't even, you know, do political theater just for purposes of optics. They don't care what we think. And that's what this tells me. So this isn't surprising, you know, of course, the DNC fucked up one of their own elections. It's just a matter of will anything come of this. And I, if I was a betting man, I'd say no, nothing whatsoever will come of this, unfortunately.