An entire night and morning have passed since the doors closed on the Iowa caucuses, and the state’s Democratic Party has yet to produce the official results of a single precinct. The data is now expected by close of business Tuesday.
Curmudgeonly campaign officials spent the night finger-pointing at political machinations conspiring to hold up the results, but an Iowa Democrat Party announcement elucidated the obvious: at the core of the delay was a coding error.
Just in: Statement from the @iowademocrats on results delay and reporting:
“While the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data. We have determined that this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system.”
Full statement below: pic.twitter.com/n0lBbQhA6C
— Nick Corasaniti (@NYTnickc) February 4, 2020
Shadow Inc. produced the caucus app responsible for the coding conundrum. If you’ve followed anything about the Democratic Party’s mishaps in cyberspace, it should not shock you that half the staff came straight from the campaign offices of Hillary Clinton.
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
This is now the second election in twice as many years in which Democrats have seen the integrity of their electoral process compromised by their own technological incompetence. In 2016, they fell for laughably simple spear-phishing attacks that successfully hacked their deficient email server security. Now, they couldn’t even code an election app properly.
All of this clears up two points that have become especially prominent in this primary. First, Democrats would be wise to outsource their cybersecurity and technology to developers and experts with experience in the much-maligned for-profit sector, not to campaign alums and charity organizers.
I’m not the only one sharing this screen shot, but it seems important for this to get around to as many people as possible.
This is the “About” page for Shadow Inc, which was contracted to make the app for #IowaCaucuses. No staff named. This outfit is inexcusably secretive. pic.twitter.com/kUZorA9Pi5
— Kevin Gosztola (@kgosztola) February 4, 2020
And second, if you can’t trust these people, who had four years to perfect the Iowa caucuses, to calculate their vote counts properly, then why on Earth would you trust them with anything as sensitive as your health data?
