[MCM] Hillary stole Iowa (3): Microsoft, which "only interacted with the parties," didn't count young, first-time voters

From:  Naked Capitalism

COMMENT - Sanders, and all of us, better check out every detail in New Hampshire.  Rove stole it from Ron Paul there in 2008.

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The Trail

The Iowa caucuses start at 7PM today. A blizzard is on the way, but won’t arrive ’til after the caucuses conclude. On the Republican side, I have no idea who will win. But even if Trump loses, I don’t think it will be by much, and I can’t see him giving up. Why would he? (Although it will be interesting to see how he redefines a loss into not being a loser.) On the Democratic side, I don’t have any idea either, and although the headline is that Clinton is in the lead, in fact, Sanders and Clinton are in a statistical dead heat. It’s worth noting, though, that even if Clinton does win, it took the entire political class acting collectively to heave her over the finish line, and she will have done so at the cost of “never, ever” being seen as “progressive” again. And Sanders can keep going until the FBI indictment convention, with his small donor base. Why wouldn’t he? So I expect the race to remain interesting for some time to come.

“In a somewhat ominous sign for [Trump and Sanders], the registration numbers have not increased much for either party, and although there is same day registration, the Iowa hands all point out that the Obama upset was presaged by very substantial registrations of new Democrats for months ahead of time” [Digby,Salon]. Sketchy sourcing, though…

And here’s one reason why: Microsoft wrote really bad software that will keep new voters from registering [ABC]:

Three days before voting begins, residents around Iowa are making plans to caucus, but new online tools launched by both the state Democratic and Republican parties designed to inform people where to go Monday evening were built with one major hole, the parties confirmed to ABC News.

The systems were only built off the list of registered voters’ addresses. As a result, for new voters who have never registered in the state and who live at addresses where no one else has registered, the online feature does not work.

“[Daniel] Lewin, Microsoft’s vice president, … said Microsoft has only interacted with the parties” [The Hill]. Who controls the spec controls the software. And who controls the software controls the vote (or, in this case, the registration). Since it would be irresponsible not to speculate, one can only wonder if the Iowa Democrat controlling the spec took her cue from Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s manipulation of the debate schedule. Meanwhile, the Sanders campaign wrote its own vote-counting software, but I’m not seeing evidence they wrote their own registration software. Which means all that work with young, first-time voters could go for naught. Yikes!