DES MOINES, Iowa \u2014 A new mobile app was supposed to help Democratic officials quickly gather information from some 1,700 caucus sites throughout Iowa. Instead, a \u201ccoding issue\u201d within the app is being blamed for delays that left the results unknown the morning after the first-in-the nation presidential nominating contest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Glitches with a new mobile app Monday caused confusion, and some caucus organizers were forced to call in results for the state party to record manually, introducing delays and the possibility of human error. Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price said the delays were not the result of a breach and party systems were secure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhile 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,\u201d Price said in a statement Tuesday, adding the issue has since been fixed. “The application\u2019s reporting issue did not impact the ability of precinct chairs to report data accurately. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The party said it expects to release unofficial results later Tuesday after manually verifying its data against paper backups. Unlike the November election and state primaries administered by state and local election officials, the Iowa caucus was administered by the Iowa Democratic Party. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
States with upcoming elections took note quickly of the problems in Iowa. The Nevada Democratic Party said Tuesday it would not be employing the same app or vendor used in the Iowa caucuses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Iowa Democratic Party would not say who developed the app for reporting caucus results, but a spokesperson for one of the Democratic presidential campaigns confirmed to the AP that a company called Shadow Inc., created the Iowa caucus reporting app and the Nevada app as well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Campaign finance records show that the IDP paid $63,000 to the tech company, Shadow Inc., in late 2019, while the Nevada state party paid them $58,000 in August. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told Fox News on Tuesday that there was no indication of \u201cany malicious cyberactivity.\u201d He added that Iowa Democrats declined his department\u2019s offer to test the reporting app. That\u2019s not unusual, as outside security firms do similar testing. The state party had said previously it had worked closely with security experts to test the app. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Des Moines County Democratic Chair Tom Courtney said he heard that in precincts across his county, including his own, the mobile app was \u201ca mess.\u201d When precinct leaders called Democratic Party headquarters, \u201cthey weren\u2019t answering the phones,\u201d Courtney said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The state Democratic Party was sending volunteers and staffers across the state Tuesday to retrieve hard-copy results of the caucuses so they can check them against results reported from precincts via the party\u2019s app and over the phone, according to multiple sources working for the party on crunching numbers and granted anonymity to discuss sensitive party information. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problems were an embarrassment for a state that has long sought to protect its prized status as the first contest in presidential primaries and the nation\u2019s first vetter of candidates. The delay was certain to become fodder for critics who argued that the caucuses \u2014 party meetings that can be chaotic, crowded and messy \u2014 are antiquated and exclusionary. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Iowa Democratic Party pressed forward with the new reporting system amid warnings about the possibility of hacking and glitches. Party officials said they took numerous security precautions and maintained that any errors would be easily correctable because of backups and a paper trail. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But organizers running precincts in Iowa didn\u2019t get to test the app beforehand. Iowa party officials had said they would not be sending the new mobile app to precinct chairs for downloading until just before the caucuses to narrow the window for any interference. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some precinct chairs said they had trouble downloading or logging into the app and didn\u2019t use it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The apps were barely working Monday night, according to a person involved in processing the data who requested anonymity to discuss the party\u2019s internal system. That forced party aides to record results from the precincts via phone and enter them manually into a database. Officials were left using photos of results to validate results and ensure accuracy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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: \u201cUnknown protocol. The address specifies a protocol (e.g., \u201cwxyz:??\u201d.) the browser does not recognize, so the browser cannot properly connect to the site.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He said he ultimately gave up and tried to call in the results to the party. Like others, he was put on hold for an extended period of time. In the end, it took hours to report results from his small site, he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The slowdown was exacerbated by the fact that the party was for the first time attempting to report three different sets of data \u2014 an initial headcount of each candidates\u2019 support, a count after supporters had realigned, and the state delegate winners. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results,\u201d the party said in a statement. \u201cThis 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.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As scrutiny turned to upcoming elections in other states, Nevada Democratic Party Chairman William McCurdy issued a statement saying that his state would not be a repeat of the same problems and that the same app and vendor would not be used. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe had already developed a series of backups and redundant reporting systems, and are currently evaluating the best path forward,\u201d McCurdy said in a statement, without mentioning Shadow by name. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nevada Democrats did not respond to a follow-up message asking if the party had already planned to use a different app and vendor or if that was a change made in the wake of Iowa\u2019s technical problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Democratic digital advertising group ACRONYM launched Shadow in early 2019, promising to help \u201crun smarter campaigns.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a statement, ACRONYM founder Tara McGowan acknowledged that the organization had a \u201crelationship\u201d with Shadow, but sought to distance herself, characterizing Shadow Inc. as an \u201cindependent\u201d company. Business registration records show they share the same Washington, D.C., address. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a separate statement, ACRONYM said it\u2019s an investor in several companies, including Shadow, but was \u201ceagerly awaiting more information from the Iowa Democratic Party with respect to what happened.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
President Donald Trump\u2019s campaign quickly seized on the issue to sow doubt about the validity of the results. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cQuality control = rigged?\u201d Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted Monday evening, adding a emoji with furrowed brows. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Richard L. Hasen, an election expert and professor at University of California, Irvine School of Law, cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the integrity of the election. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMost of the time when there is a problem with an election it turns out to be the result of administrative incompetence rather than someone cheating or some outside interference,\u201d Hasen said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Deploying new technology this close to an election is always a risky proposition, said Lawrence Norden, an elections expert with The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. Norden said it\u2019s akin to a major retailer using new cash registers for the first time on Black Friday. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTo roll out a new technology without really testing it and making it available as early as possible and giving folks the opportunity to challenge it and work out all the bugs is a high-stakes decision, which I think is proving to be problematic today,\u201d Norden said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Norden said party officials were wise to slow down the reporting to ensure accurate results, given concerns of another round of election interference by Russia or other hostile governments seeking to undermine U.S. democracy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cPeople aren\u2019t going to remember in two weeks that these results were late, but you can bet if the results changed dramatically they would,\u201d Norden said. \u201cThose of us who work in the election space support accuracy over speed.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ruth Thompson, who chaired a precinct at Lincoln High School in Des Moines, said she did not use the app to report results because organizers had problems trying to download and test it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe just came to a consensus that nobody was happy with the app,\u201d she said. She also did not try to report her site\u2019s results over the phone after hearing reports of long delays in answering the line at state headquarters, she said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instead, veteran caucusgoers at her site used calculators to compute the delegate allocation and then texted a photo of the results to Polk County Democratic Party officials, who drove it to state party headquarters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thompson said the delays in results were unfortunate because the process went \u201cremarkably smoothly\u201d in other ways. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Associated Press writers David Pitt and Scott McFetridge in Des Moines, Ryan J. Foley in Iowa City, Michelle Price in Las Vegas, Frank Bajak in Boston and Brian Slodysko in Washington contributed to this report. <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price said the delays were not the result of a breach and party systems were secure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":61493,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":10,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"coauthors":[5691],"class_list":["post-19772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cyber"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"GCUN4OXAORG4DDHEN4H7GQS7CY","arc_canonical_url":"\/it-networks\/2020\/02\/04\/tech-problem-with-mobile-app-causes-iowa-caucus-chaos\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n