Great work by Bon mots!
![](https://imgur.com/ynx0OWR.gif")
Posted on 02/06/2020 9:22:18 AM PST by richardtavor
The app that has left the results of the Iowa caucus a shambles reportedly was designed by Shadow Inc., an outfit comprised of a group of political operatives and technology workers who have previously worked for Hillary for America and Obama for America.
“We see ourselves as building a long-term, side-by-side ‘Shadow’ of tech infrastructure to the Democratic Party and the progressive community at large,” Shadow states on its website. “We are 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.”
Shadow, a small Washington, D.C.-based company, built a mobile app that appears to have caused problems during the Iowa presidential caucuses, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Shadow CEO Gerard Niemira worked for Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful campaign for president between March and November 2016 where he was “(p)romoted during the campaign to lead the small but mighty team in charge of all of the campaign’s tools for field organizers and volunteers,” according to his LinkedIn profile.
The app's failure to deliver results from caucus sites to a central reporting body, coupled with the failure of the backup phone system, left the results of the first contest of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary in limbo. The presidential candidates were forced to move on to New Hampshire with no winner in Iowa in terms of votes and no one being awarded the lion’s share of the 41 delegates that remain up for grabs.
One Iowa MSP said this was not a technology failure so much as a human failure on the part of the company that designed the app.
“I would say this company failed, not technology failed. Everything had a single point of failure. If I was designing it, there would have been multiple clusters … that’s actually a pretty common practice nowadays,” Jason Erickson, chief operating officer at ThinkSpace IT in Harlan, Iowa, told CRN. “For example, with the phone solution we provide, our phone solution is not only on redundant servers, but at redundant data centers across the U.S. I could lose a good chunk of the U.S. and my phones would still work.”
He said the reported price tag of $60,000—based on campaign finance receipts reported by the L.A. Times— was cheap for what the app promised.
“$60,000 for a specialty app like that, I think they may have gone on the value end. Maybe that’s where the failure was. If they’re looking at phones and apps and all the storage and everything else, $60,000 seems a little undervalued for me,” he said. “It’s hard to ballpark, but if we were looking at just a basic app—which they were able to go in, and make their choices and comment—I would say $100,000 to $150,000 would be more realistic.”
Shadow, which provides no contact information on its website, says its mission is “to build political power for the progressive movement by developing affordable and easy-to-use tools for teams and budgets of any size.”
The Colorado-based company has 10 employees in the U.S. registered on its LinkedIn profile, with most of those living in New York City.
The company’s chief technology officer, Krista Davis, worked as a back-end software engineer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign between June 2015 and November 2016.
“Designed and built backend microservices for tools supporting our field organizers and critical campaign systems,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “Mentored a team of more junior backend engineers, including one-off support for engineers on other teams.” She has prior experience as a software engineer with Google: Video Chat (Hangouts), Google Docs (Drive), People Storage Backend, Google.org Giving Team, her profile states.
Shadow’s chief operating officer, James Hickey, also worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign from June 2015 to November 2016 as an engineering manager. The 2007 Oberlin College graduate was previously head software engineer at Branderati before it was acquired by Sprinklr, which then hired him as director of product development.
If you recall, Platte River Networks were the ones located in Denver that set up the Clinton servers and 'bleach bit' the data on all of her electronics to obstruct the investigation. They were subpoenaed by the House but never provided documents or even a list of their employees. Their lawyer, Kenneth Eichner said "Please know that there are no documents or communications related to ‘the sensitive nature of data stored on Secretary Clinton’s private server,’ the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or the Federal Information Security Act". Of course there wasn't, since they destroyed all of the evidence on their on the Clinton Servers. Is there a Denver connection between Shadow, Inc. and Platte River? Are they an undercover group working for the Clinton Campaign? Here is a bio on Krista Davis, the CTO and former Clinton Campaign worker, from Lesbians Whotech: Krista Davis Chief Architect GroundGame
"Krista is the Chief Architect and Cofounder at GroundGame. Most of her career was as a software engineer at Google, but she left for the glamour of mission-driven work including Girls Who Code and Hillary for America. At HFA, she was the Backend Tech Lead for the Organizing Team. Outside of work, she is the Seattle affiliate lead for NCWIT and helps teach self-defense to women and the LGBTQ+ community".
Why would the IDC hire this outfit who has Clinton ties, a few days before the Iowa Caucuses? What was their connection and motives? It appears that Clinton fingers are all over this. My question is, what is she up to? What is the Democratic Deep State up to?
> My question is, what is she up to? <
Hillary still has a shot at the 2020 Democrat nomination. But she needs a brokered convention, a stalemate. Then - in her mind - she’ll be chosen as a compromise candidate.
So for Hillary, primary chaos is a good thing.
The app did not “fail”.
It operated exactly as designed.
I see that as a red flag right there.
How about a mission to ensure honest elections? I guess that's not their focus.
How about a candidate running as a Democrat who is not fully on board the modern Progressive bandwagon? That's possible. But perhaps Shadow wouldn't want to help such a candidate.
Their mission betrays inherent bias.
Great work by Bon mots!
I found it very odd that Buttigieg claimed he had won before any numbers were released. He hadn’t been ahead in the polls, so why would he have had the confidence to do that?
The demonrat primaries are even more rigged than the national elections....the usual suspects power brokers arrange everything to get their way...hellary is going to ride in on a white wheelchair and save the party at the convention....
Sure it wont be a panel van?
SHADOW CEO WEIGHS IN:
“All the data that was produced by calculations performed by the app was correct. It did what it was supposed to do.”
“The problem was caused by a bug in the code that transmits results into the party’s data warehouse.”
Could be Shadow pulled a fast one on Iowa election officials. Probably sold them an old program instead of creating a new one for Iowa.
B/c if the results were skewed, Shadow was probably using one created to bollox the results .....
We all know how they coded the machines to give every tenth vote to 2016 Hillary.
Voter fraud and election experts’ findings from a cyber/forensic investigation reveal compromised 2018 voting machines.
(1) security protections in voting machines were disabled,
(2) penetration and manipulation of actual vote tabulations was and is possible, and
(3) evidence already exists that votes were surreptitiously, electronically manipulated to change election results.
CONTACT IOWA AG-—Email: webteam@ag.iowa.gov
CONTACT IOWA SECY OF STATE PAUL PATE-—
1007 East Grand Avenue Room 105, State Capitol
Des Moines, IA 50319.
Fax: 515-242-5952.
Email: sos@sos.iowa.gov ...
Bet she knows.
Little thought experiment - if Hillary wanted the VP position she has two options, at some point she is elevated to President by succession, or she rules as the true power behind the throne.
Who are her guys - Biden is perfect for both options simultaneously and pretty sure ButtyGig would more than happy to set up his own private bath house in the White House basement and delegate the heavy lifting to the old hands of Team Clinton
I’m a full stack web developer. It’d take me a day to spin up a new LAMP server from scratch.
Within a week I could have a mobile friendly site with accounts all set up for each precinct manager with two factor authentication, data validation, and sanity checking.
Add another week for testing and validation, including load testing and penetration testing.
No custom app needed, and it’d work on any platform that can run a web browser over ssl.
But when you do your hiring based on political connections, skin color, and sexual preferences, you get the Iowa Democratic Caucus debacle.
Love the joke:
The app failed because the DNC insisted on one that was “non-binary”.
Anyone have any news on how Bernie supporters are taking this?
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