The Iowa Democratic Party held its caucuses yesterday evening and, as of noon CST today, the official party website shows all zeros for vote totals. Most news reports point to an app that apparently malfunctioned, causing the delay in reporting results. But with or without an app that malfunctioned, this is a good time to ask why the process wasn’t just run the old-fashioned way, either by show of hands or by paper ballots counted in front of the voters, and the results proclaimed immediately. Each caucus location could have had a website of its own or place to post results on a common website. If they wanted to use an app in parallel to see which would report results faster, that would have been a great idea. The biggest mistake may not be in the app that malfunctioned, but rather in the decision to make the results reporting dependent on a single technology that opened the door to a method of reporting results that was vulnerable to a single point of failure.