The faulty tabulation app, now being blamed for sending the Iowa Democratic caucus into complete chaos, has been linked to a firm called “SHADOW” and a Democratic non-profit known as “ACRONYM,” founded by former members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Iowa Democrats are blaming reporting inconsistencies and tabulation errors linked to coding problems inside the application, which left organizers confused and unable to report precinct results to the central party, and Democratic candidates all declaring victory in the first-in-the-nation presidential contest.
“While our plan is to release results as soon as possible today, our ultimate goal is to ensure that the integrity and accuracy of the process continues to be upheld,” the Iowa Democratic Party said in a statement released early Tuesday morning. An updated estimate suggested official results may not be available until Wednesday. Campaigns have, instead, released internal numbers. Unsurprisingly, each campaign claims to have either won or overperformed, despite record low caucus turnout.
A firm called “SHADOW” designed the app for the Iowa Democratic Party — and several, similar apps for other states that also host caucuses — for just $60,000 and it was intended to simply “add up and report the caucus vote at each precinct,” according to Forbes magazine. Iowa has only 170,000 voters, and just dozens of caucuses, which should have made collecting and handling the results rather simple.
But the app was never tested, according to some reports, and SHADOW did not allow the Department of Homeland Security to screen the app for potential weaknesses, leaving the system exposed to hackers. Some campaigns, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s, refused to use the app amid concerns about security and reliability.
“Our IT team expressed security concerns about it, and it ultimately did not pass our cybersecurity checklist.” the campaign told reporters Tuesday.
Perhaps the most bizarre complication of all, though, is SHADOW’s affiliations and its connections both to Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign and to current Democratic presidential campaigns.
“The firm behind the app reportedly is Shadow, an affiliate of ACRONYM, a Democratic nonprofit founded in 2017 ‘to educate, inspire, register, and mobilize voters,’ according to its website. Shadow started out as Groundbase, a tech developer co-founded by Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, who worked for the tech team on Clinton’s campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination,” according to the Los Angeles Times. “ACRONYM’s founder and CEO is Tara McGowan, a former journalist and digital producer with President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign.”
The caucus app blamed for the Iowa vote count chaos was created by tech firm Shadow, Inc.
Shadow's CEO Gerard Niemira, product manager Ahna Rao, CTO Krista Davis, and COO James Hickey all worked on the Hillary for America campaign. pic.twitter.com/hA0JPYX5Ig
— Michael Coudrey (@MichaelCoudrey) February 4, 2020
ACRONYM tried to distance itself from SHADOW Tuesday night, to no avail, particularly after it emerged that SHADOW had a conflict of interest in creating the application: it was working for former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg on separate projects.
Buttigieg’s campaign “paid $42,500 to the firm in July 2019 for ‘software rights and subscriptions,’ according to disclosures to the FEC,” per the LA Times. The campaign said Tuesday that they paid SHADOW for “a service used to send text messages to voters.” SHADOW also did work for Biden and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who exited the race for the Democratic presidential nomination late last year. “Biden and former contender Kirsten Gillibrand paid SHADOW for campaign work—$1,225 and $37,400 respectively,” according to Forbes.