It’s Tuesday morning, February 4, 2020, and we still don’t have a winner of the Iowa Caucuses.
The massive shitshow for the Iowa Democratic Party last night and into the morning came as a result of what election officials are calling “inconsistencies in the reporting”, or whatever the fuck that means. Meanwhile, the press and progressives around the country are pointing to a smartphone app the state Democratic Party used to record the results of the highly anticipated election — which completely took a dump during the process Monday night leading to the mass chaos within Iowa.
So what exactly is this app?
According to Common Dreams and several other media outlets, the app was developed by a secretive, for-profit tech firm called Shadow Inc. — which doesn’t sound nefarious at all. Anyways, the firm also has reported funding ties to ACRONYM, a Democratic digital non-profit organization.
But there’s more to this.
Shadow’s CEO is none other than Gerard Niemira who worked on the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign in 2016. Moreover though, in addition to the connections to the Clinton political machine, Shadow has also been paid for services by the Nevada Democratic Party, the Joe Biden Campaign and the Pete Buttigieg Campaign.
“State campaign finance records indicate the Iowa Democratic Party paid Shadow… more than $60,000 for ‘website development’ over two installments in November and December of last year,” HuffPost reported late Monday. “A Democratic source with knowledge of the process said those payments were for the app that caucus site leaders were supposed to use to upload the results at their locales.”
The New York Times is reporting the app was “hastily” created just two weeks ago and “not properly tested statewide”.
“The party decided to use the app only after another proposal for reporting votes—which entailed having caucus participants call in their votes over the phone—was abandoned, on the advice of Democratic National Committee officials,” the Times reported.
“The secrecy around the app this year came from the Iowa Democratic Party, which asked that even its name be withheld from the public,” according to the Times. “There were concerns that the app would malfunction in areas with poor connectivity, or because of high bandwidth use, such as when many people tried to use it at the same time.”
Meanwhile, Iowa Democratic Party officials and ACRONYM are playing damage control as of Tuesday morning.
Mandy McClure, communications director of the Iowa Democratic Party, said in a statement that the new app was not responsible for the delayed results.
“This is simply a reporting issue,” said McClure. “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.”
And in a statement released by ACRONYM spokesperson Kyle Tharpe early Tuesday morning, the group attempted to distance itself from the Shadow app.
“ACRONYM is an investor in several for-profit companies across the progressive media and technology sectors,” said Tharpe. “One of those independent, for-profit companies is Shadow Inc., which also has other private investors. We are reading confirmed reports of Shadow’s work with the Iowa Democratic Party on Twitter, and we, like everyone else, are eagerly awaiting more information from the Iowa Democratic Party with respect to what happened.”
Bottom line, the Democrat Party in Iowa is a complete mess and questions surrounding this Shadow app aren’t going to go away, especially considering the seedy moves the DNC has made leading up to Iowa as Bernie Sanders really started to gain in the polls. From stacking the deck of centrist, corporate democrats by changing debate rules for Michael Bloomberg to an app that actually records results of the Iowa Caucus being developed by a firm with very real connections to Hillary Clinton it certainly feels like it’s 2016 once again.
