These should be the last Iowa caucuses

It was somewhere after the fifth reported coin flip to decide a tie between candidates on Monday night, as Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren were addressing their supporters simultaneously, that I and the five or six remaining other Americans still watching the Iowa caucus returns had the same thought: Why?

The idea that thousands of people should be dragged from their homes the day after the Super Bowl and herded into gymnasiums in which they vote two times (in many cases for candidates they do not actually support) and that the whole absurd process should cost hundreds of millions of dollars in spending on television, travel, event planning and so on, and that the ultimately meaningless result — less than 1 percent of the total delegates that will be awarded — should be heralded as one of the most important events in American public life beggars belief. It is hard to imagine that the Iowa caucuses actually exist in 2020. It might have been dreamed up by Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts or the more cynical kind of Soviet planning official.

Past midnight, it is still too early to say why and how no results from the evening's caucuses are available. Officials from the state Democratic party said that it was because an "app" failed (imagine that). There were rumors of hour-long waits on the backup telephone line and angry words exchanged between party officials.

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It is impossible for a process to fail this spectacularly without giving rise to conspiracy theories. Already it is being darkly hinted that Biden, whose share of the vote might have been as low as fourth, has the most to gain from a significant delay in the results of the first 2020 nominating contest. By the time it becomes clear, supports of other candidates whisper, who actually won the momentum that might have otherwise come out of Iowa will be negated. One wonders whether Bernie Sanders regrets having insisted upon the various post-2016 rules changes that gave us the new system.

This is not to suggest that nothing good came of Monday evening's caucus fiasco. The fact that each of the candidates had already given a vague inspirational speech thanking his or her supporters hours before there was any indication of who had won. Great job and on to New Hampshire. Nothing could have more effectively underscored the ultimate irrelevance of Iowa than a non-result allowing everyone not named John Delaney to claim a victory of sorts, express their sense of "optimism" going forward, and otherwise ignore the question of who actually won.

In his own post-caucus non-victory victory address, Sanders declared that the "message" Iowa had sent to the rest of the country was that "we want a government that represents all of us." I think it is more likely that the message people are likely to take away from Monday's contest is that the caucus is the worst of both worlds, an ill-understood, antiquated, anti-democratic mess that systematically excludes parents, working-class people, the shy, and the otherwise socially well-adjusted that has been taken over by well-meaning tech consultants.

We may be several election cycles away from the national single-day primary that this country deserves. But I think it is likely that we have seen the very last Iowa caucus.