The app used by Democrats to tally up and report the results of the Iowa was created by a firm run by veterans of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and was not properly tested at a statewide scale, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.
The app, created by the tech firm Shadow Inc, was also quickly programmed over the last two months in the run up to the Iowa caucus Monday night, according to people briefed on the app by the Iowa Democratic party, the outlet reported.
The company was reportedly co-founded by Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, who formerly worked for Clinton's tech team in 2016.
Officials blamed the problems on a coding issue that led to a significant delay in counting and reporting results. The error would only partially report data, which forced the party to switch to manual backups.
"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,” state Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price said in a statement Tuesday morning.
The app was designed in an attempt to modernize the caucus reporting system that once relied on people acting as precinct chairs calling in their results.
Shadow issued a statement on Tuesday, apologizing for the problems people experienced on Monday at the caucus sites.
“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,” the company wrote in a series of tweets Tuesday.
"As the Iowa Democratic Party has confirmed, the underlying data and collection process via Shadow’s mobile caucus app was sound and accurate, but our process to transmit that caucus results data generated via the app to the IDP was not," the statement read. "Importantly, this issue did not affect the underlying caucus results data. We worked as quickly as possible overnight to resolve this issue, and the IDP has worked diligently to verify results.
"Shadow is an independent, for-profit technology company that contracted with the Iowa Democratic Party to build a caucus reporting mobile app, which was optional for local officials to use. The goal of the app was to ensure accuracy in a complex reporting process," the company added.
"We will apply the lessons learned in the future, and have already corrected the underlying technology issue. We take these issues very seriously, and are committed to improving and evolving to support the Democratic Party’s goal of modernizing its election processes," the statement said.
The trouble compacted several issues experienced by caucus-goers Monday, including precinct chairs having difficulties getting through to party officials to report results over the phone.
The Nevada Democratic Party said Tuesday that they will no longer use the app to report caucus results on Feb. 22.
"NV Dems can confidently say that what happened in the Iowa caucus last night will not happen in Nevada on February 22nd. We will not be employing the same app or vendor used in the Iowa caucus,” Nevada State Democratic Party Chair William McCurdy II said in a statement.
“We had already developed a series of backups and redundant reporting systems, and are currently evaluating the best path forward,” he added.
Photo: Getty Images