Media
Iowa Caucus Failures: Bad Design and Disinformation
Understanding two cognitive failures may improve future elections.
Posted February 4, 2020 Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
The Iowa caucuses have failed. The app used to report votes failed and the resulting vacuum left too much space for disinformation. These reflect failures to apply basic psychology. But there is hope.
As I write this, the morning after the Iowa caucuses, no vote totals have been released. This failure was inevitable. Completely predictable. We can avoid similar failures in the future, but doing so requires thinking about the nature of human cognition.
First, the failure of the app for reporting results was inevitable. From the reporting I’ve seen, the app was built quickly. Some apps built quickly could work. But this app was never tested. No people unfamiliar with the app ever tried it. This is a serious gap in basic User Experience research (generally called UX research).
Apparently, some users may have encountered problems using this brand-new app. Are you surprised? People had problems downloading the app. Then using the app was dependent on having a good internet connection. Have you ever tried to use the internet to download and use an app the first time? Inside a building without WiFi access? In a rural location with limited cell phone service? And the first time you use it, does it ever seem to work correctly?
Good UX research would have discovered many of these possible problems, both in terms of loading the app and using the app. Problems would have been avoided. At this point, I would argue there are no “user errors” when people try to use an app or another type of software. There are only design errors. Designs will fail if not been tested with users, and particularly not tested in real-world settings when the users are under pressure and trying to monitor other concerns as well.
The second is the amount of misinformation circulating about the caucuses. Some of the information started flowing before the caucuses even started. Internet trolls began circulating false information about voting rolls in Iowa. The false information was quickly fact checked, by a variety of sources and groups (see this article in the Washington Post). But the false information continues to circulate on social media. Neither Twitter nor Facebook have pulled down the false information or stopped the people who first shared the information from sharing additional false information.
As the results were slow to come in, a news vacuum was created. Of course, nature abhors a vacuum. Apparently, the news media and social media abhors a vacuum too. Something was bound to fill in the void. In this case, false information rushed in and filled the vacuum. I’ve seen rumors that the vote was hacked, that people were trying to hide the outcome, that the election was rigged. These rumors are false information promoted by people with a direct interest in the political campaign.
A clear disinformation campaign is at work here. The goal isn’t to get you to vote a particular way. In this case, the goal is to convince you not to trust the system. "The election is rigged, and your vote won’t matter." The goal of these nefarious internet trolls (and some political campaigns) is to infiltrate your thoughts. It is to attack your confidence in the system. They want to convince you to give up on the system and not vote.
Solving the disinformation campaign depends on your critical thinking skills. But using critical thinking after you’ve been exposed to misinformation and disinformation is only partially effective. Research shows that the false information will stay in your head. You will forget the source. You’ll forget that it was false. It may very well continue to influence you. This is the curse of social media. False information circulates and recirculates.
With the false information circulating about the Iowa caucuses, there is another solution. Social media companies need to be responsible and follow basic ethics. They are responsible for the false information that circulates on their platforms and they can stop the flow of misinformation.
But there’s also good news here. Iowa has a clear paper trail for the votes and caucuses. They aren’t dependent on the app that failed. We will get reliable results. Whenever we use a computer program, we all know to back up our work. Luckily Iowa has backups. Hopefully all elections will keep backups, on computer and on paper. The computer ate my homework should never be an excuse in the classes I teach. And the computer ate my homework should never be an excuse for an election outcome.
So, there are lessons for moving into the 2020 campaign. We need backups because systems will break. People won’t use them correctly, especially if the computer systems aren’t well tested. We also need better news and social media systems. Relying on everyone to be critical thinkers all the time is not realistic. We need to improve the information flow to quickly stop the spread of disinformation. Oh, and vote. It matters. Don’t let the delayed results or the disinformation dissuade you.
