DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVE Tara McGowan is denying that her high-profile liberal firm ACRONYM played a role in the Monday evening caucus debacle, claiming that her firm was merely an investor in the company Shadow Inc., which developed the app at the center of the controversy. But internal company documents, a source close to the firms, and public records show a close and intertwined relationship between Acronym and Shadow.

In addition, ahead of the caucuses, questions swirled inside Shadow over the company’s ability to deliver a quality product, and there was concern from at least one staff member that senior leaders of Shadow and Acronym — both of which were launched as a new Democratic bulwark against President Donald Trump — have been far from neutral in the Democratic primary.

Several officials at caucuses attended by NBC News reporters struggled with lengthy hold times that made it impossible for them to report results over the phone.

The phone number to report Iowa caucus results was posted on a fringe internet message board on Monday night along with encouragement to “clog the lines,” an indication that jammed phone lines that left some caucus managers on hold for hours may have in part been due to prank calls.

A smartphone app designed to help announce the results of the Iowa caucus ended up crapping out and causing a massive delay by almost an entire day.

The Iowa caucus traditionally uses gatherings of people in counties across the state to determine which candidates they want to back for the presidential nomination. They use a paper trail as a way of auditing the results. While Iowa may have only 41 delegates needed out of 1,990 to nominate a Democratic candidate, the results are nevertheless seen as a nationwide barometer for who might be named to the ticket.

An hours-long delay in reporting results from the Iowa caucuses raised serious questions about the process.

It was not immediately clear exactly why Iowa Democrats were slow to report the results — they said in a statement they were checking for accuracy after finding inconsistencies

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3a8ajj/an-off-the-shelf-skeleton-project-experts-analyze-the-app-that-broke-iowa

Julkaistu 5.2.2020
On the first day of official voting in the 2020 Democratic primary, new reporting procedures failed and paralyzed the counting of votes in the Iowa caucus. #Colbert #Comedy #IowaCaucus

Julkaistu 5.2.2020
Glitches with a newly-designed app caused a major delay in the release of the Iowa caucus results. CNET senior producer Dan Patterson spoke with cyber experts about why the launch backfired, as he takes a look inside the latest vote-tallying technology.

The app, called IowaReporterApp and developed by a company called Shadow Inc., malfunctioned during the caucus, causing mass chaos and delaying the public reporting of results until Tuesday evening. The app was designed to rapidly report early results, not tabulate final vote counts. That means its failure will not result in the election result being altered.

“Honestly, the biggest thing is—I don’t want to throw it under the bus—but the app was clearly done by someone following a tutorial. It’s similar to projects I do with my mentees who are learning how to code,” Rahjerdi said. “They started with a starter package and they just added things on top of it. I get deja vu from my classes because the code looks like someone Googled things like ‘how to add authentication to React Native App’ and followed the instructions,” Rahjerdi said.

“The mobile app looks hastily thrown together,” Dan Guido, CEO of cybersecurity consulting firm Trail of Bits, told Motherboard.

IowaReporterApp had a few basic functions, according to the experts who analyzed it:

Once a precinct chair logged in using a precinct identifier number, PIN code, and two-factor authentication, they were run through some basic information about how to run a caucus.
Precinct chairs were asked to enter the total number of attendees at a caucus.
Precinct chairs were then asked to enter vote totals for the first round of the caucus and the second round of the caucus. The app was then supposed to calculate how many delegates each candidate was supposed to be awarded.
The app was supposed to then send these results to a Google Cloud Functions backend. That backend was controlled by Shadow.

In an interview with Motherboard, Shadow CEO Gerard Niemira said that the app was simple by design.