Smartphone app created chaos in Iowa.
SAN JOSE — The smartphone app that the Iowa Democratic Party released to party officials for Monday’s caucuses was designed to quickly tally results from around the state, speeding the vote-counting process for the first presidential contest in the nation.
But a coding error in the hastily programmed and secretive app led to an unprecedented breakdown in reporting results — and left Democratic voters waking up Tuesday morning with no idea who had won the pivotal caucuses.
There’s no indication that the problem was caused by a cyberattack. But the problems with the app, which was created by a littleknown company called Shadow Inc., exemplify the danger of incorporating new and untested technologies into the voting process, experts say.
“What this shows is that internet-based systems can be extremely fragile,” said David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who has advised the national Democratic Party about voting technology issues. “You should not deploy a system that hasn’t gone through rigorous and scaled testing, and you should not deploy a system whose architecture and technical details are secret.”
The fiasco also raises questions about ACRONYM, a prominent liberal nonprofit with ties to Silicon Valley that funded Shadow Inc. and has pitched itself as a counterweight to the Trump campaign’s digital prowess.
The problems started Monday evening as precinct chairs around Iowa tried to use the app to report the results from their caucuses to the state party. Some had trouble downloading the app on their smartphones or uploading their data, according to reports from around the state, and the party’s backup phone line to report data was overwhelmed with calls.
Iowa Democratic Party officials said Tuesday morning that the problems stemmed with a “coding issue” in the app, while stressing that there was no hack or cybersecurity issue.
“While the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data,” party chair Troy Price said in a statement. “We have determined that this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system.
“We have every indication that our systems were secure and there was not a cyber security intrusion,” he added, saying the systems had been tested by “independent
cyber-security consultants.”
Jefferson, a board member of the nonpartisan election integrity group Verified Voting, said national Democratic officials told him that the Iowa party had only decided to use the app within the last few months, and that state officials had been “very secretive” about the process.
“They only changed to this app about two, two-anda-half months ago,” he said in an interview. “That surprised me, that they would switch to another tech system that had not been used before so late in the process.”