Iowa caucus app blamed for delayed results won't be used in other primaries, DNC chair says
The Nevada Democratic Party already paid the creator of the app upward of $50,000
FOX Business' Hillary Vaughn now says Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., won the popular vote.
The new mobile app that threw the Iowa caucuses into chaos on Monday night won't be used to tally votes in other states when they cast their ballots in the 2020 Democratic presidential election, the Democratic National Committee said.
"It is clear that the app in question did not function adequately. It will not be used in Nevada or anywhere else during the primary election process," DNC Chairman Tom Perez said on Tuesday night. "The technology vendor must provide absolute transparent accounting of what went wrong."
Although the Nevada Democratic Party already paid Shadow Inc, the maker of the app, tens of thousands of dollars, it will not deploy the technology later this month. In a statement, state Democratic Party Chairman William McCurdy II vowed Nevada's caucuses on Feb. 22 would not be a repeat of Iowa's.
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"We will not be employing the same app or vendor used in the Iowa caucus," he said. "We had already developed a series of backups and redundant reporting systems, and are currently evaluating the best path forward."
Financial records reported by the Nevada Democrats showed that they had paid more than $50,000 to Shadow last year.
During an interview with Bloomberg News, Shadow CEO Gerard Niemira, who served as Hillary Clinton's director of product during her 2016 presidential campaign, defended the company but apologized for the technological glitch.
"I'm really disappointed that some of our technology created an issue that made the caucus difficult," Niemira said. "We feel really terrible about that."
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The Iowa Democratic Party paid Shadow, a tech firm that last year joined with Acronym, a liberal nonprofit group focused on digital messaging, more than $63,000 in two separate payments in November and December last year for "website development," according to state campaign finance records. Those payments were for the app the caucus site leaders were supposed to use to upload the results at their 1,765 precincts.
But the system quickly broke down on Monday night — and confusion from the caucuses has dragged into a third day as uncertainty continues to linger over the results. The state party was skewered by some for only releasing partial results, which showed former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders leading.
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Officials said the party began to enter data manually once it was clear there was an issue.
Niemira said the breakdown stemmed from the way that Shadow transmitted data to the Iowa Democratic Party and was not a glitch with the app itself. But he acknowledged the company should have caught the breakdown in the code before election night.
"Yes, it was anticipate-able. Yes, we put in measures to test it. Yes, it still failed. And we own that," he said.