Website To Tell Democratic Caucus Details
Iowa’s Democratic Party will take a big step forward in election reporting on January 3, 2008. They will report results from each precinct on a website. Caucus attendees will not have to wonder if their results were correctly tallied by some black box at the other end of the phone line used for reporting the winners.
Like in 2004 the precinct chairmen will use a touchtone phone to enter their results without actually talking to anyone at party headquarters. In 2004 there was no way to know if the phone system properly recorded or tallied the results. That will change in 2008, according to Carrie Giddens, communications director, who wrote this Friday:
The Iowa Democratic Party will have a public website displaying the caucus results as they are reported by each precinct. This website will show a number of things but will include the number of county delegates won by each candidate in each precinct, which will allow anyone around the world to see the caucus results down to the precinct level.
This follows the advice of the DNC in this document about public aggregation of election results.
I don’t know the website address yet or how timely it will be. I was told the techies at the Iowa Democratic Party were concerned that they might need an inordinate amount of bandwidth just to accommodate all the curious websurfers who would hit the site on caucus night. The real purpose of the site is to verify the vote for the candidates and the precinct people who phoned it in, but many stay-at-home types (and many Republcans) will be checking on their local result, so this seems like a realistic fear. Here’s hoping they have figured out how to handle it. And congratulations to them for making the effort.
How long before the Republicans can match this?