Democratic presidential candidates have spent the past three years driving around Iowa, shaking hands and kissing babies, with the hope that supporters would show up for yesterday’s Iowa Caucus. It’s now midday on Tuesday, and we have no idea who won. The culprit was a new app designed to make it easier and faster to report results. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that this app would fail.

Caucusing is low tech by design. Many caucuses take place in high school gyms with attendees standing in a specific corner to support a particular candidate. Undecided voters are herded to the middle and actively courted by groups on all sides. A candidate’s success is decided by the size of their crowd at the end of the night. All the app needed to do was communicate those numbers. And yet, here we are.

Thankfully, there was a backup system. If the app failed, precinct captains could dial a phone number to report the results. Unfortunately, many said the number was busy—all night. Perhaps the Iowa Democratic Party should have sprung for call waiting.

The cause of the app failure is unknown for now, but it seems that it resulted from a mixture of crashes, poor training, and inadequate preparation on the part of users. Also, the app was being downloaded onto users’ personal phones, making the install bases completely unpredictable. In other words, the exact same mix of challenges that face any deployment of new technology. Why should Iowa be immune?

This is not a matter of technological sophistication. Last week, PCMag moved our Slack instance behind OneLogin authentication. To access Slack, we now need to verify our identity using OneLogin and two-factor authentication. Our IT department notified everyone in advance and offered instructions on how to make the switch. The results were entirely predictable.

Monday morning was a mess. Most staffers hadn’t read the email, many forgot their OneLogin password, and others had configuration problems with their mobile devices. I personally got trapped in an authentication loop in which LastPass kept trying to enter the wrong password for me. I figured it out (without calling IT, thank you!), but it took me an hour to set it up.

Our helpdesk was overwhelmed with questions.

Also, a number of users, maybe 50 percent, had no problems at all. They smugly chimed into conversations that they didn’t see what all the fuss was about. In other words, it was exactly the same as the Iowa Caucus rollout.

Within 24 hours, PCMag had our tech issues sorted out. Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of luxury when it comes to elections. A day without Slack is not the same as a day without an Iowa Caucus winner.

The Iowa Democratic Party hurt itself by providing so few details about the app before the election. It wouldn’t say who wrote the code or what tests were performed to make sure it was secure. The New York Times reports the app was built in the last two months by a for-profit company called Shadow Inc., a name that will no doubt delight right-wing media for months.

By pursuing “security through obscurity,” the Iowa Democratic Party exposed itself to a massive technical failure at best and huge security vulnerability at worst.

Ironically, the botched app rollout shows the importance of keeping a paper ballot system. Those paper ballots are being counted right now (fortunately, Iowa doesn’t have that many voters to count). But that’s just one of the lessons to be learned from this.

There’s no evidence that last night’s debacle was caused by outside actors—Iowa democrats did this to themselves. But the fact remains that our election system is under attack. The FBI, DHS, and national intelligence agencies all agree the Russians targeted the US election in 2016 and are still targeting us today. And there’s no reason to think Russia is alone in its efforts. We’ve had three years to prepare for the 2020 election, and in its first statewide test, we’ve failed spectacularly.

The US needs a build a new election infrastructure that’s publically scrutinized, beta-tested, and above all, trustworthy. We could have started that process after the 2016 election, but we chose not to. The future of our elections will undoubtedly be digital, but the present clearly isn’t.