CAUCUS CHAOS
‘Coding issue’ blamed for delay in reporting results
A “coding issue” with a new mobile app is being blamed for delays that left the results from Iowa Democratic caucus sites unknown the morning after the presidential nominating contest.
The app was supposed to help Democratic officials quickly gather information from some 1,700 caucus sites throughout the state.
Partial results — with 62% of precincts reporting — were finally released late Tuesday afternoon, showing former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Bernie Sanders leading.
Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price said the delays were not the result of a breach and that party systems were secure.
IOWA CITY, Iowa – What went wrong with the Iowa Democratic Party’s hightech plan to speed up the reporting of caucus night results? Pretty much everything.
A little-known startup company was picked by party leaders to develop a mobile app for reporting results, with key details such as the name of the firm kept confidential. While security experts tested the program, many of the people who needed to use it at 1,678 precinct locations across Iowa had little to no training.
And a “coding issue” within the app muddied the results, prompting party officials to halt reporting and move to a back-up system to verify the counts. Some caucus organizers were forced to call in results for the state party to record manually. But that system quickly became overwhelmed.
When it came time to launch the app on Monday night, there was widespread confusion and frustration. It’s similar to the sort of chaos election security experts have been warning about.
“While the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data. We have determined that this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system,” Iowa Democratic Party Chairman TroyPrice said in a statement Tuesday. “The application’s reporting issue did not impact the ability of preParty cinct chairs to report data accurately.”
The glitch underscored the risk of relying on voting technologies that election integrity advocates consider unreliable. “If I were prone to Twitter, I would use the hashtag #IToldYouSo,” said University of Iowa computer science professor Douglas W. Jones, an election security expert. “It looks like the worstcase scenario happened.”
Unlike the November election and state primaries administered by state and local election officials, the Iowa caucus was administered by the Iowa Democratic Party.
While the app was available to caucus organizers for downloading on their smartphones a few days earlier, some waited until Monday to do so and encountered difficulties in following the instructions or received error messages.
officials defended their decision to delay the release of the results, saying they preferred to have accuracy over speed. But before Monday’s caucuses, they had touted the app’s automated ability to calculate delegates and report results as an improvement over the complicated math and legions of phone calls that the system has long relied upon.
In a Twitter post Tuesday, Shadow Inc. acknowledged after months of confidentiality that it was the firm hired to build the app and apologized for its failure.
“We sincerely regret the delay in the reporting of the results of last night’s Iowa caucuses and the uncertainty it has caused to the candidates, their campaigns, and Democratic caucusgoers,” the company said.