A similar app will be used in Nevada caucuses
Nevada ditches plans to use app blamed for Iowa caucus chaos
Andrew Griffin @_andrew_griffin Tuesday 4 February 2020
The team behind the disastrous app used in the Iowa election app has been revealed.
The app, created by a startup named Shadow, was supposed to be used to co-ordinate information from the caucuses and allow organisers to send results back to the party. But it crashed repeatedly through the night, and has led to a failure to declare any kind of result.
The party said the problems had been caused by a “coding issue in the reporting system” that has since been fixed but meant it was still unable to declare any results.
Now focus has turned onto the company behind the app, Shadow, and the confusion surrounding how it managed to be created and used in one of the most important parts of the lead-up to the presidential election later this year.
Shadow’s website describes the team behind the app as “campaign and technology veterans who have built and implemented technology at Hillary for America, Obama for America, Google, Kiva, Apple, the AFL-CIO, and the DNC”.
Explaining the name of the company, it claims to be a “building a long-term, side-by-side “Shadow” of tech infrastructure to the Democratic Party and the progressive community at large”.
The history of Shadow is unclear and somewhat obscure.
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What is the ‘Shadow’ app causing chaos at Iowa caucus?
A since-deleted post on the website of nonprofit Acronym, apparently written by CEO Gerard Niemira, announced “the launch of Shadow, a new technology company that will exist under the ACRONYM umbrella and build accessible technological infrastructure and tools to enable campaigns to better harness, integrate and manage data across the platforms and technologies they all use”.
But in a statement last night, as the chaos in Iowa continued, Acronym distanced itself from the app. A spokesperson said it had “not provided any technology” for the causes, and suggested that Acronym was only an “investor”.
Shadow appears to have begun life as an app called GroundGame, and then Groundbase, which was first founded in 2017. It appears to have been re-branded in the intervening period, before being launched under its current name in 2017.
Niemira said in the same post that he had created the app with “a few of my colleagues from the Hillary for America campaign where we built tools for [the campaign’s] field team”. Many of the people involved in the creation of what is now called Shadow worked on the Clinton campaign, as well as at technology firms, according to LinkedIn profiles.
The app will also be used in the Nevada caucus, due to happen on 22 February. The local Democratic parties in each state paid $60,000 to Shadow for their services, according to Federal Election Commission disclosures.
A new app has helped cause chaos in the first chance voters had to determine who could be the next president of the US.
The app was intended to help gather information from across Iowa on who the roughly 1,700 caucus sites had chosen to be their presidential nominee.
But it has ended up contributing to chaos that means that there is no clarity over who won the contest, hours after it has finished.
At the time of publication, officials were still scrambling to find and verify the results. And they were scrambling, too, to explain how one of the most closely-watched moments in the lead-up to the election could have gone so dramatically wrong.
What was the app supposed to do?
The plan was that caucus organisers would be able to use the app to send in their results, allowing the state party to easily collate them from those submissions. It is the first time that such a system has been used in the Iowa caucus.
The decision to use the app came together at the last minute, according to the New York Times, which reported that the Iowa Democrats had been preparing to use a different system that would involve people calling in their results over the phone. That plan was pulled with just two weeks to go, the paper reported.
What is so wrong with the app?
Very quickly, users started reporting glitches and errors, and organisers were able to input the information as intended. Many complained that they were being shown error messages and that the app would not load properly, forcing them to call in rather than use the app as planned.
The Iowa caucus fiasco is a metaphor for the state of US democracy
Jonathan Green, who chaired a precinct in Lone Tree, said that when he tried to put the results into the reporting app, he kept getting a confusing error message: “Unknown protocol. The address specifies a protocol (e.g., “wxyz:??”.) the browser does not recognise, so the browser cannot properly connect to the site.”
The backup plan of having people call in their results also ran into trouble because the phones they had been asked to use in case of problems were not being answered, according to Des Moines County Democratic Chair Tom Courtney.
Issues were further exacerbated by the fact that the app was only made available at a later stage, in an attempt to stop outside interference. That meant it had not been fully tested, and that organisers had little experience of it before the caucuses.
Officials have stressed that the delays and problems are not the result of a hack or intrusion, and that the results will remain safe despite the problems.
“We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results,” the party said in a statement. “This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.”
Who made the app?
The creation of the app still remains mired in some mystery: very little is known about the process of its creation, or where it came from. Though it is reported to have been made by a company called “Shadow”, the exact details of that startup are still unclear.
In fact, many of the organisations – such as nonprofit Acronym, which was reported to be an investor – have actually distanced themselves from the creation of the app in the wake of the mess.
What happens now?
All of the information is also kept in paper backups, and officials can now scour through those to find less high-tech but more reliable results for who has won. Local Democratic officials have claimed that means that the result will still arrive as normal, and will be reliable when it does, with the problems only meaning that they will take longer to actually report.
But the fallout could have broader implications beyond Iowa – into the rest of the primaries and caucuses, and even into further elections. As well as further scrutiny of the app, it could lead to yet more questions about why Iowa gets to be the first state in the country to declare, and whether that privilege should go to somewhere else in the wake of such high-profile mistakes.
Additional reporting by agencies
Jonathan Green, who chaired a precinct in Lone Tree, said that when he tried to put the results into the reporting app, he kept getting a confusing error message: “Unknown protocol. The address specifies a protocol (e.g., “wxyz:??”.) the browser does not recognise, so the browser cannot properly connect to the site.”
The backup plan of having people call in their results also ran into trouble because the phones they had been asked to use in case of problems were not being answered, according to Des Moines County Democratic Chair Tom Courtney.
Issues were further exacerbated by the fact that the app was only made available at a later stage, in an attempt to stop outside interference. That meant it had not been fully tested, and that organisers had little experience of it before the caucuses.
Officials have stressed that the delays and problems are not the result of a hack or intrusion, and that the results will remain safe despite the problems.
“We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results,” the party said in a statement. “This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.”
Who made the app?
The creation of the app still remains mired in some mystery: very little is known about the process of its creation, or where it came from. Though it is reported to have been made by a company called “Shadow”, the exact details of that startup are still unclear.
In fact, many of the organisations – such as nonprofit Acronym, which was reported to be an investor – have actually distanced themselves from the creation of the app in the wake of the mess.
What happens now?
All of the information is also kept in paper backups, and officials can now scour through those to find less high-tech but more reliable results for who has won. Local Democratic officials have claimed that means that the result will still arrive as normal, and will be reliable when it does, with the problems only meaning that they will take longer to actually report.
But the fallout could have broader implications beyond Iowa – into the rest of the primaries and caucuses, and even into further elections. As well as further scrutiny of the app, it could lead to yet more questions about why Iowa gets to be the first state in the country to declare, and whether that privilege should go to somewhere else in the wake of such high-profile mistakes.
Additional reporting by agencies
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