The McGowan
For almost thirty years I managed a high school and middle school Cross Country meet in Central Ohio, the McGowan Invitational. Cross Country is the sport where kids run for miles, 3.1 miles for high school and 2 miles for middle school. But unlike track, where they loop lap after lap, in Cross Country the race is over fields, hills, and in the case of our meet, through forest paths. It is running at its essence; without the controls of lanes and all left turns.
Our meet grew through the years. It started with a couple of dozen teams, a few races, and a picnic when it was all over. But by the 2000’s it turned into one of the biggest meets in the state, with hundreds of school competing in what ultimately became nineteen different races. We started at nine in the morning and ran races until six at night.
It’s pretty simple to “administrate”. The kids in each race line up at a starting line, the gun goes off, and 3.1 miles later they come across the finish line. To “score” the meet, the finish order, first to last, is recorded along with their times. No big deal.
5000 Runners
But as the size of the races grew, the sheer volume of kids crossing the finish line at the same time increased. When it reached hundreds of kids per minute, crossing a narrow finish line to get “lined up”: some falling down, some throwing up, all struggling for breath; maintaining that order was a challenge.
Our finish line crew was amazing. Of the hundreds of races, and tens of thousands of athletes crossing the line, they kept order almost every time. They were so good I can talk about the two times it didn’t happen, when all of the backups and safeguards simply failed.
The first time was absolutely my fault. We had far too many kids, over five hundred, in one race. When two hundred hit the finish line within a minute of each other, there was no way to move them through the “chutes” and get their information. The line stacked up, out of the chute, into the field, and back down the course. We did end up getting “the order” correctly, but their times were lost.
We never ran a race that large again. Adding races made the day longer, but we realized that our “forest” paths couldn’t handle the crowds, and neither could our finish.
Wrong Path
The second time wasn’t our fault. Some high schools kids from a “guest” school thought it would be fun to change the “gates” that directed kids along the paths. I got a radio call: the race was in the wrong place, running the wrong way. We had hundreds of kids running a different path in the forest.
We re-directed them, kept the race moving, and ultimately got them to the finish line. Those poor middle schoolers ran 2.4 miles instead of 2.0, and while we got all of the order and the times, those times were meaningless.
The next year, instead of ropes and flags, the gates in the woods were metal posts and steel fencing. No one would alter our race again.
We never had the colossal disaster, we never completely “lost” a race. We switched to electronic timing, RFI chips tied into shoes and video camera finish line, and kept on going. While I no longer manage, the McGowan still continues as one of the best meets in the state. In the end, kids love to run in the woods.
Last Night in Iowa
Iowa had their “meet” last night. Iowans love the caucus system of choosing their candidates, they love the community coming together to talk through their choices, rather than the cold solitude of the ballot booth. The Caucus is like Cross Country, it’s freeform and open and infinitely transparent. Supporters all sit together, cheering and talking, and seeing the choices that all of their neighbors make. A primary is like track: ordered, disciplined; easily controlled. No one changes the gates in a track meet.
Last night Iowa “lost the race”.
They were striving to satisfy the media demand for information, the public demand for speed, and the party’s demand for transparency. Instead of reporting a single result, how many “delegates” each candidate earned in each precinct, now they were reporting raw results, from the first count, and from the second count, and from the final count; and then the delegate apportionment.
Iowa had a system that was essentially pencil and paper. The precincts wrote down the numbers, then at the end of the night called them into a central “scoring” office. At the office, there were lots of people ready to tabulate the results. When it was that single result, it took about two hours to tabulate the 1700 individual precincts.
Too Much Information
But this year, with all of the extra information coming out, the Iowa Democratic Party decided to use modern technology. They had an “app” developed for phones, and asked the precinct captains to download the “app” and report using it. The problem, in our era of Russiagate and hacking, using the “app” opened the opportunity for the system to be infiltrated.
The Iowa Dems decided to hold onto the reporting “app” until the last moment to protect it from attack. But when it was finally released to the precincts, it didn’t work as they expected. So precinct captains went back to old-school paper system that they knew so well.
But the people weren’t there to take the phone calls in central headquarters, the Party was counting on the “app”. So now they’ve got a mess. Hours waiting to give results, and no one there to tabulate them.
The paper trail is there, and we will know exactly who did what in Iowa. The media, sitting on their hands for an entire Monday night, is making a huge deal of the failure in process. But the process didn’t fail, Iowans selected their candidates. We just don’t know the details, yet.
Dems Own It
I know, I heard it all last night. How can we convince voters to let Democrats run the country when we can’t even run a caucus in Iowa? Trump is laughing, Don Jr. is goading, the Party looks foolish. We should “own” the problem.
We do. We “lost” the race, and maybe Iowa won’t lead off the electoral season anymore. But in the end, the results will be clear, and defined, and dependable. It’s not a question of accuracy, it’s a demand for instant gratification. And that’s the lesson we should learn from Iowa. Every election, caucus or ballot box, should have a paper system that can backup all of our “fancy” electronics. Why? Because disasters happen, and the one thing every election has is time. Time to count paper ballots, time to make sure it’s right, time to be accurate, not just fast.
Folks can argue whether a caucus system is a good way to determine candidates, just like they argue about whether Cross Country or Track is better. I would argue there is room for both: like in running, each brings out a different set of skills from the candidates, and from the communities. Sure the Iowa Democratic Party screwed up, but they’ll get it right.
Maybe it’s just more paper and pencils.
