Hillary Clinton is the Democratic Party’s most reviled boogeyman at this point, often being characterized as a curse on the organization itself.
The discomfort stems from the former Secretary of State’s scheme to rig the 2016 primaries against Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, which was only discovered after emails from within the Clinton campaign were released by whistleblower website Wikileaks.
Now, in 2020, Clinton has chosen not to run for the nomination – something that many liberals likely believed would keep the former First Lady at a reasonable distance from the action. Maybe then they could skate through the primary season without another Clinton controversy.
In 2016, for the first time, precinct chairs used a smartphone app built by Microsoftto relay results to party headquarters, enabling faster reporting than communicating via telephone hotline. This year, with the state party promising to disclose more granular data than in the past, the job of coding the app went to a fledgling tech firm run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
It turned out to be a crushing failure.
Throughout the long night, precinct chairs found themselves unable to get the app to work. Many never figured out how to download or install it in the first place. Those who tried to report their results via a backup phone line wound up on hold, sometimes for more than an hour.
Supporters of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 run for the White House were quick to jump on the conspiratorial bandwagon again as the news of this Clinton-connection spread on social media.
The app’s failure was on a grand scale, and 24 hours after the results were first expected to be made public, just over half of the votes have been counted.
