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ELECTION season is ramping up in the US, and Americans have been bombarded with warnings that the process might be hacked by adversaries from overseas or extremists at home.

Then, during the first night of caucuses in Iowa to help decide the Democratic presidential nominees, it happened. Those overseeing the vote found clearly incorrect tallies for the Democratic candidates in their software systems, volunteers at caucus sites couldn’t report results and Twitter exploded with conspiracy theories. Except it wasn’t a secret plot or an attack. It was just a phone app that had been deployed without rigorous testing.

Caucuses are a rather odd US tradition in which the parties hold thousands of local meetings in a handful of states, essentially to ask voters who they would like to see run for president. In terms of political importance, they are halfway between opinion polls and the primaries, where a group of people meet to vote for their party’s next presidential candidate.

The first caucuses traditionally take place in Iowa. This year, the Iowa Democratic Party decided to showcase its technical prowess by commissioning an app to allow election workers at more than 1700 gatherings across the state to report their meeting’s results to the party headquarters.

The app, created by a somewhat dubiously named company called Shadow, Inc., was supposed to make results available within hours. But it had problems from the start.

First, election workers couldn’t download it without disabling security features on their phones. Then it simply wouldn’t accept the tallies that were entered. The final results took more than three days to arrive, and two candidates declared victory. The chair of the US Democratic National Committee has called for a review of the tally.

It is the kind of chaos that undermines voters’ faith in the democratic process. And all of it could have been avoided if the Democrats had just used email to send in the tallies. Or text messages. Or online spreadsheets. Or even their damn phones.

For decades, caucuses reported results by telephone. But when it came time to upgrade, the Iowa Democratic Party didn’t want to use the well-tested digital systems that are already out there. Why use email when you could have a brand new, special solution just for caucuses? Now there’s an app for democracy! Except there wasn’t. So Shadow whipped up a piece of garbageware at the drop of a hat.

“This whole absurd scenario is part of what William Gibson calls the ‘half-assed singularity’”

The problem wasn’t just the atrocious app. There were knock-on effects. Anticipating a perfect solution for a system that wasn’t actually broken – at least, not on a technical level – the Iowa Democratic Party only had a few people on hand to answer phones at their headquarters. That meant when the app died, there was nobody to take calls and the people running caucuses were left waiting on hold for hours. One was on national television when he finally got through, only to have headquarters hang up on him.

Many results weren’t reported until the next day because caucus goers went home to bed. Luckily, the Iowa Democrats had created a paper audit trail. They could then tally up results manually, using pen and paper, thus making the Iowa caucuses’ tech infrastructure even less advanced than a 1930’s phone switchboard.

How did this happen? It is tempting to blame the disaster on how little we understand new technology. But the troubles started because caucus planners were ignorant about the power of the technology we already have, like email and shared documents. It would have taken zero money and possibly a few hours for someone to set up a shared document where someone from every caucus could type in the handful of numbers they needed to report from the evening’s votes.

The Washington Post reported that Shadow’s parent company, Acronym, was founded by Tara McGowan, who was digital adviser to Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. She has deep connections to members of the party, and they in turn helped fund her venture by making Shadow’s app the centrepiece of the Iowa caucuses.

This whole absurd scenario of human cluelessness is part of what the science fiction writer William Gibson calls the “half-assed singularity”.

The singularity is when our machines become so advanced that they change the world beyond human comprehension. In the tech industry, it is usually hailed as a moment of great liberation – or doom if we are unlucky. But if we half-ass the whole thing as usual, the singularity looks a lot like the Iowa caucuses did. We bungle our way into the future, wrecking a few democracies in the process, and never fully understand how radical email was all along.