“Congratulations, Iowa. You played yourself,” tweeted Lyz Lenz, a resident of Iowa and a columnist at The Gazette. Here’s what people are saying about why the caucuses went wrong — and why, at least in their current form, they can’t go right.

Iowa’s tech problem

The Iowa caucuses got their first-in-the-nation status in 1972, and traditionally each precinct has simply called in its results. This year, however, the Iowa Democratic Party commissioned Shadow Inc., a for-profit technology company, to build an app for tabulating and reporting the votes. Further complicating matters, precincts had to report three sets of data this year — the initial alignment of caucusgoers, the realignment of those with candidates below 15 percent support and then the final number of delegates won at each site — instead of one.

Precinct chairs apparently struggled to download and log in to the app, which had been put together in the past two months and had not been properly tested, creating widespread confusion.