CEO Gerard Niemira of Shadow Inc., the developers of the unfortunately named election app that caused Monday’s Democratic presidential caucus in Iowa to turn into a much bigger shitshow than it usually is, told Bloomberg on Tuesday night that he’s really sorry about all that. But he argued that the app was actually pretty solid, you know, so long as one overlooks the software bug that ruined everything.
“I’m really disappointed that some of our technology created an issue that made the caucus difficult.” Niemira told Bloomberg. “We feel really terrible about that.”
“The app was sound and good,” Niemira added. “All the data that was produced by calculations performed by the app was correct. It did the job it was supposed to do, which is help precinct chairs in the field do the maths correctly. The problem was caused by a bug in the code that transmits results data into the state party’s data warehouse.”
That bug was “catastrophic,” he said.
We sincerely regret the delay in the reporting of the results of last night’s Iowa caucuses and the uncertainty it has caused to the candidates, their campaigns, and Democratic caucus-goers.
— Shadow, Inc. (@ShadowIncHQ) February 4, 2020
Shadow was run in part by former staffers on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, according to the Los Angeles Times, and is owned by ACRONYM, a Democratic nonprofit run by 2012 Barack Obama campaign digital producer Tara McGowan. Neimira had previously worked at the San Francisco-based Kiva microlending platform, and Shadow co-founder Krista Davis worked on the Clinton team and spent eight years at Google. The app itself was reportedly hastily built in just two months for around $US60,000 ($89,100).
As of about 9:00 p.m. on Monday, reports of problems with the Shadow app had resulted in everyone from the campaigns themselves to caucus volunteers and CNN commentators starting to get pretty angry. But Niemira told Bloomberg the bug was fixed by 10:00 p.m., and that “caucus results that came from our app were sound and verified.”
Niemira also said that volunteers and officials had been trained on the app’s “‘sandbox’ mode” for weeks and that the main issue earlier in the day was “people having difficulty logging in for the first time.” (University of South Carolina computer science professor Duncan Buell told Politico that parties and developers’ practice of keeping election app materials secret is “dumb.” According to the New York Times, it’s not clear that the app underwent any rigorous testing and the Department of Homeland Security denied prior reports it had reviewed the app.) Most of the precincts chose not to use the Shadow app, Niemira told Bloomberg, and out of everyone given the option “We saw about a quarter reporting successfully through the app.”
That caused a flood of volunteers to call in via phones instead, overwhelming the Iowa Democratic Party’s phone lines at the same time that the software bug caused the Shadow app to submit only partial data, triggering systems designed to catch bogus caucus results. According to Bloomberg, Niemira said that “Yes, it was anticipate-able. Yes, we put in measures to test it. Yes, it still failed. And we own that.”
ACRONYM has seemingly distanced itself from Shadow, and Nevada Democratic Party officials have scrapped plans to use the same app in their own upcoming caucus. Neimira declined to tell Bloomberg who their non-ACRONYM investors are or who serves on its board of directors.
— Kyle Tharp (@kylewilsontharp) February 4, 2020
University of Iowa computer science professor Douglas Jones told the L.A. Times that mobile systems are a “security nightmare” and that the app “doesn’t sound like it was cost-effective.” He added that “I can buy a lot of temp workers and phone lines for $US60,000 ($89,100).”
The Iowa caucus results still aren’t in, with just 71 per cent of precincts reporting as of 12:30 a.m. Wednesday.