If you've been paying attention to the Iowa party caucus lately, you'll know something stinks. It's been three days since votes were recorded, but the Iowa Democratic Party has yet to release all the votes, and has been taking an unusually (and, for Iowa state officials, an embarassingly) long time to release the votes that are currently out; in fact, the night the votes were supposedly tallied, not a single result was released. The most recent information I can find says 54 precincts have yet to be officially reported, standing at 97% released to date. The party's official explanation for this has been that the app used to tally the votes malfunctioned under high load.

The question of whether voting should be counted by a closed-source, proprietary app aside, this app was produced by a company named Shadow, Inc (yes, really). It is interesting that Pete Buttigieg's campaign paid tens of thousands of dollars to Shadow in recent months. The CEO of Shadow also happens to be a Buttigieg supporter. Shadow was funded by an organization named ACRONYM, a fairly opaque (one might say "shadowy") nonprofit created by billionaire Reid Hoffman, who has given hundreds of thousands to Democrats, and $2800 to Buttigieg's campaign, and spent hundreds of thousands more in an infamous online disninformation campaign against Republicans. CEO of Acronym is Tara McGowan, who is married to a senior advisor in Buttigieg's campaign.

On the night of the tally, before any data had been released, Buttigieg declared victory: "What a night. Because tonight, an improbable hope became an undeniable reality." As subsequent data was very slowly released, it initially heavily favored Buttigieg; results for precincts which voted for Sanders tended to be released much later. The IDP has also released data at odds with what Iowa state officials recorded, and in Buttigieg's favor; some of these were later corrected and some of which has yet to be. Current official data shows Buttigieg winning Iowa by a margin of three delegates over Sanders; nevertheless, many mainstream media outlets have already taken to proclaiming Pete's victory. For the outlets which have refrained to declare a winner, they will have to wait, most likely, until this weekend, as the results of the remaining precincts are slowly trickled out. If Sanders really has won Iowa, this will kill MSM media coverage of the victory.

Thoughts?