An email from an Atlanta RP meetup member in Iowa

[jenninlouisiana]

Ya know, I don't get this because I already have my donor lists (plus, you can access donor names from several online sources such as FEC.gov, opensecrets.org and then look them up online with www.whitepages.com etc.)

And at the end of the day, you can go door to door as many as possible...

 

[whiffet]

I already tried clarifying that once. Please revisit my post on page 11 (post #108). It was not rogue sabotage. This is a much different situation.

The 21,000 voters (an inexact total but close enough) were comprised of three groups of people: RP supporters who had previously told us they would caucus for RP, RP supporters who had not previously told us whether or not they would caucus for RP, and potential RP supporters who had told us previously that they might caucus for RP. Many of the latter were technically "undecideds."

 

[AlexMerced]

essentially without any organization we do what the polls say, so this would say the polls can be looked as what we will get for sure by this precedent, so we can be sure we'll get 9% for sure, a hell of lot more if we don't have a situation like this on tuesday.

So beating Thompson and Giuliani is a sure thing, Beating Huck will be the challenge

 

[whiffet]

Why didn't you get the info sooner?

Forgot to answer why we didn't get ya'll the info sooner.

1) We were in YMCA camps in the middle of absolutely nowhere. No one had Internet save for those with PDAs, iPhones, &c.

2) We had no idea what was going on either!

 

[achilles28]

I already tried clarifying that once. Please revisit my post on page 11 (post #108). It was not rogue sabotage. This is a much different situation.

The 21,000 voters (an inexact total but close enough) were comprised of three groups of people: RP supporters who had previously told us they would caucuss for RP, RP supporters who had not previously told us whether or not they would caucus for RP, and potential RP supporters who had told us previously that they might caucus for RP. Many of the latter were technically "undecideds."

We're talking the same language.

Rouge sabotage = immature kid with axe to grind. Same thing. Just sexxed up a bit

We still need to get to the bottom of it.

Another Iowa Volunteer claims the faulty list was "software error" and the Master recomprised well before Caucus time - yielding no significant turnout either way:

I was there and was one of the students who waited for hours to get the lists...
It wasn't an issue of files being backed up... it was an issue of software malfunctioning that was supposed to match up the addresses we wrote down while canvassing door to door with the person's name, phone number, and caucus location.
80 students stayed up all night on the 2nd and manually fixed most of this. At the end of the day the corrupt data really only amounted to 2-3k of the voters...and these 2-3k were hardly supporters most were people we had listed as 25% chance of turning out if we were extremely lucky. So if everything had worked out we might have had an extra 750 votes. Still would have been 5th.
EVERYONE on the identified and potential supporters lists was called often more than once to get turned out.
WHAT HURT US at the end of the day most was the large turnout... we got out about what we expected in terms of definite yes supporters for Ron Paul. The potentials that we didn't get out were democrats and independents- people who notoriously never vote in a republican caucus... come states like NH and MI et al where you have all day to come out and vote.
There are many more positives that can be taken from IA than negatives. Its a 50 state campaign... and we got 10% in a state where Dr. Paul's refusal to bible thump and hatred of corn subsidies is a huge turn off for virtually every republican there.

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?p=819717#post819717



Those two versions are different, with very different implications.

If some disgruntled kid sabotaged it (and the list wasn't reconstituted for Vote time), it paints HQ more favorably and the Movement with more support (solid 3rd?).

If Dantes version is closer to the truth (and the list was reconstituted), HQ failed to generate the votes we need AND couldn't manage the simple task of protecting their VOTER DATABASE. In that case, Grassroots needs to shift away from the Campaign and fund their own projects - phone banks, door knocks, ad buys.

 

[whiffet]

Wow, okay.

I'm unfamiliar with all that. As far as Des Moines is concerned, I only know what I've been told, I guess. My word is certainly not definitive here.

 

[Suzu]

The PDF list in my area is WAY out of date. I'm listed as a democrat and I haven't been registered as D for almost 3 years.

The one for my area has 46 names on it. There should be around 1500. Half of the listings are not even close to my precinct. The accompanying map is for a town in a different county - but that's an improvement over the first map they provided, which was for a county in another STATE.

I've sent bug reports as requested. No change since the beta program was first announced, which was several days after we blanketed the whole town here with slim jims and DVDs, having decided that it was best to proceed independently of the PCC....

Looks like we're going to have to win this election in spite of them....

 

[spcmckay]

This is a hoax

I've met Joe Seehusen in Arlington VA. He is not the Iowa coordinator. Dr. Drew Ivers is. The rest of the story sounds like bullshit anyway so I would disregard it. Ben Hodges is a Meetup member in Atlanta and probably knows nothing about it.

Justin Mckay
Bellingham Ron Paul organizer
Dr. Drew Ivers

 

[Carl Corey]

I guess Paul's message of centralization being prone to inefficiency holds true and people shouldn't be all that surprised if things don't go as smoothly as planned.

Things like these need to be centralized however, you can't put personal information out on the web which would be a privacy violation, not to mention that some people would get a dozen calls from random enthusiasts.

There's also personal responsibility to consider, people should be able to get all the information from ronpaul2008 for their caucus instead of being called by volunteers. If you don't have transportation you can walk to the nearest yard with a ron paul sign and ask if you can hitch a ride on caucus day, etc.

One big issue I haven't seen addressed is people with young children that need a babysitter.

 

[LibertyEagle]

As people have said before, decentralization makes something like that tragedy impossible.

Now people are saying we should be better organized? What happened didn't happen to the decentralized grassroots portion of the campaign, it happened to an area where people relied on a centralized organized core that is easily destroyed by infiltrators.

"Organizing" us requires leadership which really equals easy sabotage on a massive scale.

A bottom up campaign is not powerful enough (intimidation-wise) to prevent sabotage. It is not made up of trusted insider allies, we all very recently came to know one another.

If you try to "organize" this whole thing between a bunch of people you haven't known-for-years you are only trying to make things exponentially worse.

Oh BS. It's called, backing up the database.

 

[whiffet]

I've met Joe Seehusen in Arlington VA. He is not the Iowa coordinator. Dr. Drew Ivers is. The rest of the story sounds like bullshit anyway so I would disregard it. Ben Hodges is a Meetup member in Atlanta and probably knows nothing about it.

Justin Mckay
Bellingham Ron Paul organizer
Dr. Drew Ivers

1) I am a Meetup organizer.

2) What does my living in Atlanta have anything to do with whether I know something about the situation? Volunteering for 10 days in Iowa leading up to the caucus doesn't count?

3) Joe Seehusen has nothing to do with anything. Neither does Ivers. What do these people have to do with me?!! I never mentioned them. Stop associating them with me. I mentioned one name other than mine--Edward Ronquillo.

 

[whiffet]

Oh BS. It's called, backing up the database.

I've tried explaining this before, but they were backing it up. It was the fact that several individuals were checking and backing up Ronquillo's work that made him ditch. It threatened the "credit he was due."

 

[thisisgiparti]

There's only a few days till NH, but the grassroots should be aware of these problems and organized. It is obvious now the NHQ is useless, incompetent and uncooperative.

Get in touch with grassroots, meet-ups and locals in NH. Review the mistakes in Iowa and be prepared for the worst. This is the biggest of the big, and it could get dirty.

 

[rory096]

It's too late to complain about this, guys. Let's just keep going and make sure it doesn't happen again.

 

[oparea]

This should not be a distraction.

 

[Dave Pedersen]

Central planning and execution is contrary to our philosophy of freedom for a very good reason.

Keep the organization and execution of tasks LOCAL, at the precinct or at most county level. That means everyone has to assume more leadership. In a free society leadership is everyone's responsibility. As in guerrilla warfare not everyone should be a leader but everyone needs to continually assess the need for leadership and be at the ready to fill any voids as they appear.

This fluidity of coordination can only happen among people who are neither timid nor eager for self-serving notoriety. Too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the soup and not enough leaders leave the remainder disorganized and ineffective. Courage and humility with an aim to ensure a good balance of organization and execution of tasks.

Freedom works.

 

[Paul4Prez]

I hope not.

It was a damn spreadsheet. I do marketing research and this sounds like a classic case of someone who doesn't know how to sort properly and messed up the list, like they only highlighted and sorted one column instead of the entire row.

And it isn't like you need a bunch of extra servers. This list could have been backed up by simply emailing it to people or taking a minute to copy it on some flash drives. There is NO excuse for "not having the people" and NO excuse for not having backups. This is Murphy's Law, Computing 101 stuff, the FIRST thing you learn: Back up early and often.

It doesn't take long to save a spreadsheet, even with multiple tabs and tens of thousands of names, to a external disk.

The first problem here is that Excel is NOT a database program, and it shouldn't be used as one. If that is the case, it's inexcusable.

The second problem is what everyone touched on -- no backup? I mean, really? There should have been paper backups, electronic backups, CD backups, in numerous places, so no incompetence/technical glitch/sabotage could have had any impact at all.

 

[Ebuchholz]

Too bad. It'd be nice if the campaign would indicate that they need DBAs.

 

[tonyr1988]

Not to rehash an old thread, but I was a student in Iowa during the caucus - I was one of the people that stayed up all night on the 2nd to manually look up precinct information (since the auto-parser failed miserably). Of course, the hundreds of man-hours put in that night were a waste.

Just wanted to add verification to many of the claims. Most things said about Edward are entirely, 100% true. The most ridiculous part is the "database." They split the supporters into 500-person blocks to give each of us, in Excel format. I asked someone, "What is the master database in, sql?" The response: "No, just a huge Excel sheet."

I asked again why we couldn't just auto-parse the precinct data. "Well....it worked for 2 or 3, but when we tried to do it on the whole database, it failed....so we waited until the last minute, and then made everyone do it manually."

It wasn't the official campaign that should be directly blamed for this. It's a small group of people that know little to nothing about database structures or even computers in general that ruined it. It's absolutely ridiculous, and I hope that we can get better in the future.

Sorry, just needed to rant a little.

 

[Trance Dance Master]

This sounds right...I was on the phone with Meagan the whole day

I called Meghann Walker about that as well. The only thing she has to say about the infamous Des Moines database debacle is that there are "a lot of rumors going on around the internet". I'm sure you had a different conversation. She's always too busy to talk as well. That's politics for ya.