Politics is a strange a capricious beast, but few political processes are as odd and arcane as the caucuses. These delegate-selecting meetings have secret ballots, rooms cut into candidate quadrants and, until this year, analog phone calls and *gasp* physical mailings to tally the votes and decide which candidate each precinct would support.
Iowa's Caucuses, the first in the 2016 presidential election cycle, is casting aside the landline for a mobile device and an app from Microsoft and partner Interknowlogy that will let them tally the ballots and delegates and deliver information to Microsoft's cloud, which will collate and let the party leaders see the results via a web-based command center. When they're satisfied that the results are accurate, each party uses a Microsoft-provided API to push the results to a public-facing website (and some media outlets).
"It's fascinating to see how it plays out," said Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft's Corporate VP of Technology and Civic Engagement. He spoke to me from Des Moines, Iowa’s huge Capital Square facility, where Microsoft set up a vast media center and Lewin will be witnessing his first caucus process.
Lewin explained that Microsoft approached the parties over a year ago, asking if there was any way mobile technology could facilitate a more secure and reliable caucus reporting system. He insisted that the neither Microsoft nor the parties were motivated by any previous issues in the more analog tallying system. Regardless, "both parties said, 'hey we should do this,'" recalled Lewin. He added, "It's a similar process to what’s been run, but what we’ve just got now is this interesting architectural overlay of using devices and the web as a transport."
Microsoft built the system with partner Interknowlogy over the course of a year and, after walking party leaders through the app, let them train their own precinct leaders.
"Both parties are very motivated, the training has gone very well," he said.
The fact that both parties so readily accepted the program and that both apps are virtually the same has helped damp down any concerns about party favoritism -- mostly. Last week Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders and his campaign officials questioned Microsoft's motives, openly expressing concern that some Microsoft employees had contributed to Hillary Clinton's campaign. Of course, Microsoft employs thousands of people, making it safe to assume that others may have contributed to Sanders campaign as well as those of Republican candidates. When I asked Lewin about the micro-controversy, he said, "Bottom line, we’re here to support the parties in their process, but no more than that."
If all goes smoothly and the app data collection speeds the caucus tallying process and makes it more bullet proof, will Microsoft's apps continue on to future caucuses and primaries? Maybe not. "We have been very focused on this particular caucus as the one we’re invested providing this service. There’s no plan to engage in other processes," Lewin said.
A walk-through
As for what caucus participants face when using the mobile phones (iOS, Android and Windows Phone), the app is incredibly simple. What follows is a quick walk-through of what Republican precinct leaders will see when they use the app (the Democratic App is almost identical).
The Democratic app is the same, to a point. Because Democratic caucuses use a process where caucus participants separate into quadrants in a room (one for each candidate), they have to make sure that the resulting groupings leave candidates with a viable number of delegates. As you can see in the screen below, Microsoft's app actually does the viability calculation for precinct leaders.
