|App that stuffed the Iowa caucus built by fmr Hillary Clinton staffers
Wednesday, 05 February 2020
The app blamed for Iowa’s stalled Democratic caucus results was slapped together by an alum of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign.
Gerard Niemira, CEO of Shadow Inc. — the company tapped by the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) to build an app for reporting the results of the crucial, first-in-the-nation caucus — served as director of product on Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
As of early Tuesday, the IDP had still not released the results of the chaotic caucus.
Shadow’s role in building the app was not publicly known before the failed rollout.
Precinct chairs across the state experienced problems downloading or logging into the app, one of the ways they were supposed to be able to send the results from their smaller, individual caucuses to the IDP, Bloomberg News reported.
“The changes that were made to the caucus this year were in response to criticism from [Sen. Bernie] Sanders’ campaign in 2016,” Dr. Karen Kedrowski, director of the Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University and an expert on caucus history, told The Post of the app’s commissioning and rollout.
The app, Kedrowski contends, was supposed to be one of multiple fixes made to the caucus process after the Sanders campaign challenged certain procedures from 2016 as unfair.
“You could log in, the app would be secure, and you could report your results without having to wait on the phone to submit,” she said of what the app would’ve promised to do.
Kedrowski added that along with the app’s failed rollout, “sheer incompetence [from the state] added to the mess.”The company, which initially built the app to simplify and streamline the process of reporting results in Iowa counties, also counts the Nevada Democratic Party as a client. Nevada is the next state that will hold a caucus.
The IDP paid Shadow Inc. more than $60,000 for “website development” relating to the app, according to state campaign finance records.
Last year, a company called ACRONYM said in a press release that it was launching Shadow to “harness, integrate and manage data across the platforms and technologies.”
Amid the fallout from the caucus chaos, however, a spokesman for ACRONYM tried to distance the company from Shadow Inc., merely saying that they invested in the tech firm.
“ACRONYM is a nonprofit organization and not a technology company,” spokesman Kyle Tharp said in a statement. “As such, we have not provided any technology to the Iowa Democratic Party, Presidential campaigns, or the Democratic National Committee.”
Tharp went on to say that ACRONYM invests in numerous for-profit companies. “One of those independent, for-profit companies is Shadow Inc., which also has other private investors.”
