The state of Iowa has had the privilege of holding the first electoral vote of each election cycle since 1972. With this vote comes great responsibility. It’s common to see Iowa’s caucus winner receive a ratings bump or swing in momentum so it’s a coveted state to win. Hopefuls spend months, or even up to a year in the state in order to lay the groundwork and canvass for votes. This year, with a stacked Democratic field and the election so critical for the party in general, the buzz surrounding the caucus was palpable.

The realization that the results were erroneous hit the political networks later that evening. Each network from CNN to Fox News began to report that something had gone wrong with the tallies, and the winner could not be determined as regularly scheduled. In an election year this important, the idea that the results of one of the most critical parts of the nominee process were somehow incorrect inspired much hysteria. Supporters of certain groups began to wonder if corruption was involved. Conspiracies spread, and social media was filled with angry supporters of various candidates, as well as those upset with the Democratic National Committee, and what they viewed as an operation to thwart the chances of certain candidates winning. One prominent conspiracy was that Pete Buttigieg, who had received money from the company that owns the app charged with tallying the votes, was in cahoots with the business in order to skew the results in his favor. As of today, nearly 100% of the votes have finally come in, but some are still questioning the legitimacy of the results with a narrow Pete Buttigieg victory over Bernie Sanders.

Rather than a conspiratorial or deviant effort to give the win to one candidate over another, a more obvious explanation would be incompetence. Caucuses in Iowa are unlike any other democratic form of voting. Voters’ preferences during a caucus are visible to everyone. There is no privacy, which can lead to intimidation tactics or recruitment to a certain candidate, which can compromise votes or make the voting unrepresentative. Caucusing is also an hours-long process, rather than a short trip to the ballot box, and those who run the caucusing sites are volunteers who have their own candidate preferences and aren’t necessarily ‘experts’. With new technology, an app, recently introduced into the process, it’s reasonable to assume some of the people in charge of the caucusing sites would become confused with the new method of reporting delegate counts.

Those who believe in the conspiracies may have reason to as well. Politics in America has never been without the assumption of corruption. A multitude of suspicious circumstances surrounding elections has occurred, especially recently. Some prime examples are the 2000 and 2016 elections, which both had outcomes that made some suspicious.

The caucus catastrophe has called into question Iowa’s ability to hold such an important first-vote. Many bring up the state’s disproportionate white demographic as a cause for concern since the Democratic party is so diverse in comparison, and many say that it is unrepresentative of the vote of the entire party. The other questionable aspect of Iowa’s caucuses is the caucus style, which is mentioned above.

It remains to be seen if Iowa will be stripped of its privilege to hold the nation’s first vote in the nominee process, but this catastrophe does raise many important questions about diversity and privacy within its caucus.