First Lesson of Iowa: Don’t Entrust Democracy to Techies

A fe w years ago, I was living in San Francisco and working on a local political organizing campaign as part of a national political advocacy group. Given that we were in the Bay Area, the local chapter of this advocacy group comprised a lot of well-meaning young people who worked in tech. So a group of them had decided that the best way to do political organizing was to put those tech skills to use.

This meant that we, as chapter members, would vote on local issues through a website they had developed, which required some kind of login code that we were given if we attended a certain number of meetings; those meetings also required us to log in via a computer. The laptop sign-in system was easy to miss as you entered a meeting, as I and others did many times — but missing that step made us ineligible to vote on the direction of the chapter. This is all to say the system was a headache and made what should have been a simple problem — how to discuss and debate marching orders for the chapters — into an overly complicated mess. Read Full Article »