Iowa's hanging chads

The stakes aren't quite the same, but the Iowa Caucuses are increasingly looking like Florida 2000.

Why it matters: Apps are the new hanging chads, and good luck convincing people to vote with apps after what they saw play out this week.

The big picture: The Iowa Democratic Party has a crisis of its own making, with ramifications that affect the national party as well as the future of voting.

• The app glitched on caucus day, with precinct leaders struggling to send in their results.
• The Iowa Democratic Party botched their planning, with confusion reigning on election night and a lack of viable backup options to stop the bleeding.
• Posters on 4chan reportedly shared the phone number of the caucus results line and encouraged readers to "clog the lines."
• When results finally came out 48 hours later, they included a series of errors that the state party didn't catch during what it claimed was a thorough process.
• Now the state party and DNC are at loggerheads over a "recanvass," with the state party saying the DNC doesn't get to decide.

Between the lines: The issues on election night have combined with a series of errors that make it unclear whether there will ever be a "completely precise account" of Iowa 2020, the N.Y. Times notes.

• "[M]ore than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, that were missing data or that were not possible under the complex rules."
• "In some cases, vote tallies do not add up. In others, precincts are shown allotting the wrong number of delegates to certain candidates. And in at least a few cases, the Iowa Democratic Party’s reported results do not match those reported by the precincts."

Go deeper: For those who need a reminder about hanging chads, this NPR story will help.