The results of the Democratic Iowa caucus were delayed Monday evening because of a technical issue with the results system, according to reports. About 85% of precincts were reporting results by 10:30 p.m. in 2016, according to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. This year, there were no results in at the same time, reportedly because of an issue with the application being used.
Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg’s campaign contributed money to the technological firm whose voting app that contributed to reporting delays in the Iowa caucuses. Federal Election Commission filings reveal that Buttigieg’s campaign gave tens of thousands of dollars to Shadow on July 23, 2019 for “software rights and subscriptions.” Shadow, a technology company that has an investor in the Democratic digital nonprofit organization ACRONYM, was also paid $60,000 over two installments by the Iowa Democratic Party to build an app to help make caucus voting easier and faster for precinct volunteers.
FEC filings also reveal that the Nevada Democratic Party paid Shadow $58,000 for “website development.” (photo evidence at link) Plus, the firm is run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The Los Angeles Times reported this morning that an app created by a tech firm run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign is taking heat for the unprecedented delay in reporting Democratic caucus results from Iowa.
BACKSTORY 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.
Niemira had previously worked at kiva.org, a nonprofit that makes loans to entrepreneurs and others in the developing world, and Davis had spent eight years as an engineer at Google. ACRONYM’s founder and CEO is Tara McGowan, a former journalist and digital producer with President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign. With no official results in from Iowa, it looks like Mayor Pete Buttigieg is claiming victory in the caucuses. He took to Twitter to announce a victory. Sort of. --SNIP--
At this rate, with this sort of disorder and chaos, President Trump is going to steamroll whoever the Democrats throw at him and his well-oiled machine this November. It is going to be like the 2016 election all over again, which is really quite appropriate considering Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, Robby Mook, is reportedly tied to the electoral mess in Iowa.
Iowa’s Republican and Democratic Parties] and their app and web development vendors partnered last fall with Harvard’s Defending Digital Democracy Project to develop strategies and systems to protect results and deal with any misinformation that’s reported on caucus night.
They worked with campaign experts Robby Mook and Matt Rhodes — as well as experts in cybersecurity, national security, technology and election administration — and simulated the different ways that things could go wrong on caucus night. Mook, 2016 campaign manager for Hillary Clinton, and Rhodes, Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign manager, helped develop a public-service video to alert campaigns to the warning signs of hacking and misinformation.
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The three Shadow principles involved in Iowa: CEO Gerard Niemara, CTO Krista Davis, and COO James Hick…...operating office in Denver. (Remember when Platte River Networks, Denver, had Hillary’s govt computers?)
Shadow brags on their website “We are campaign and technology veterans who built and implemented technology at (A) Hillary for America, (B) Obama for America, (C) Google, Kiva, Apple, (D) the AFL-CIO, and, (E) the DNC.”
Ut, oh......Obama, too?
Repubs didn’t use the app