Technological and infrastructural complications with the Iowa caucuses earlier this week have been traced to one fatal flaw, third-party investigators have announced: the Iowa Democratic National Committee’s online voting infrastructure relied on Stanford web authentication services in order to process voters.
After half-a-dozen different parts of the Iowa DNC’s voting process went wrong in another half-dozen different ways, voices across the nation declared the whole affair “a fiasco,” “utterly catastrophic,” or — in the case of one Mayor Pete Buttigieg, found smirking to himself while swirling a glass of wine and propping his polished leather shoes up on a grand piano — “so strange… what a fortuitous turn of events.”
Facing near-nationwide backlash, the team of investigators immediately set to work locating the source of the troubles — and almost as immediately traced it all back to Stanford University’s byzantine, unintuitive, potentially Geneva Code-violating web portal ecosystem
“To start with, we required some kind of SUNet ID bullshit that nobody knew about beforehand, where you had to be a part of Stanford University or something to vote?,” explained DNC chairman Tom Perez.
“So that was bad. And after that, you had do some kind of two-factor somesuch whatchamacallit?
I don’t really get it. You had to download an app, some kind of DuoPush thing, or get texted a code, and then it routed you through some kind of course enrollment page which of course crashed and went down for three hours, and all the candidates were listed as classes that filled up when twenty people voted for them, except for Buttigieg who had two hundred slots and also Yang who had two.”
“Also,” Perez added, “it let you vote for this mysterious dark-horse candidate named ‘Social Dance.’ I think he’s a Green Party guy?
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DNC officials have since spent most of the time following the investigator’s announcement apologizing profusely for the mix-up and vowing to resolve the issue by moving the voting system to a more reliable system, like CARTA or Rate My Professor.
At press time, Buttigieg had fulfilled his campaign’s promise for open-door transparency by releasing his spring quarter class schedule, mysteriously doing so before enrollment is set to open this coming weekend.
