who designed iowa caucus app

App Used to Tabulate Votes Is Said to Have Been Inadequately Tested

The app was quickly put together in the past two months and was not properly tested at a statewide scale, according to people briefed on the matter.

Credit... Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Feb. 3, 2020

DES MOINES — The app that the Iowa Democratic Party commissioned to tabulate and report results from the caucuses on Monday was not properly tested at a statewide scale, said people who were briefed on the app by the state party.

It was quickly put together in just the past two months, said the people, some of whom asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

And the party decided to use the app only after another proposal for reporting votes — which entailed having caucus participants call in their votes over the phone — was abandoned, on the advice of Democratic National Committee officials, according to David Jefferson, a board member of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election integrity organization.

Late Monday night, that chain of events came to a head when results from the Iowa caucuses were significantly delayed. While vote counts in the past have typically been reported earlier in the evening, the Iowa Democratic Party held a conference call with representatives from each campaign at around 10:30 p.m. Eastern time to tell them that roughly 35 percent of precincts had reported, but that it would provide no other details about the results.

A spokeswoman for the state party issued a statement late Monday denying that the delays were the result of the new app's failure.

"We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results," said Mandy McClure, the spokeswoman. She added that this was "simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion."

"The underlying data and paper trail is sound," she continued, "and will simply take time to further report the results."

But multiple Iowa Democratic county chairs said they had struggled to use the app and were experiencing hold delays of up to an hour when calling into a phone hotline the party has used for decades.

The Floyd County chairman said that he had three precincts unable to report results, trying both the app and the hotline. The caucus secretary for a precinct in Story County said he had been on hold for over an hour to report the results. The Humboldt County chairman said one of its precincts had faced wait times of up to 30 minutes.

The app used by the Iowa Democratic Party was built by Shadow Inc., a for-profit technology company that is also used by the Nevada Democratic Party, the next state to hold a caucus, as well as by multiple presidential campaigns. Shadow's involvement was kept a secret by Democratic officials through the caucuses.

Video player loading — Democratic candidates tried to spin the chaotic situation at the Iowa caucuses, and campaigned in New Hampshire as they awaited the results. Credit Credit... Mark Makela for The New York Times

An official from Shadow did not respond to requests for comment, but one of the company's investors, Acronym, a progressive nonprofit company, released a statement saying that Acronym was a separate entity from Shadow and that it was still waiting to hear from the Iowa Democratic Party "with respect to what happened."

Matt Blaze, a professor of computer science and law at Georgetown, said that introducing apps in the midst of an election posed many problems. Any type of app or program that relies on using a cellphone network to deliver results is vulnerable to problems both on the app and on the phones being used to run it, he said.

"The consensus of all experts who have been thinking about this is unequivocal," Mr. Blaze added. "Internet and mobile voting should not be used at this time in civil elections."

Any technology, he said, should be tested and retested by the broader cybersecurity community before being publicly introduced, to test for anything ranging from a small bug to a major vulnerability.

"I think the most important rule of thumb in introducing technology into voting is be extremely conservative," he said.

Christopher C. Krebs, the director of the Homeland Security Department's cybersecurity agency, said late Monday evening that the mobile app had not been vetted or evaluated by the agency.

The secrecy around the app this year came from the Iowa Democratic Party, which asked that even its name be withheld from the public. According to a person familiar with the app, its creators had repeatedly questioned the need to keep it secret, especially from the Iowa precincts where it would be used.

That person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he had agreed not to discuss details of the app, said that there were concerns that the app would malfunction in areas with poor connectivity, or because of high bandwidth use, such as when many people tried to use it at the same time.

"This app has never been used in any real election or tested at a statewide scale and it's only been contemplated for use for two months now," said David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who also serves on the board of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election integrity organization.

J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan said, "This is an urgent reminder of why online voting is not ready for prime time."

Mr. Jefferson warned that Nevada was also set to use a similar mobile app to report its caucus results in a few weeks.

In 2016, Iowa state officials used a Microsoft app to report results. A Microsoft spokesman said the company's involvement in 2016 was a one-off and that it had not participated in the caucus this year.

Earlier on Monday, reports that Iowa precinct chairs were struggling to use the app fueled conspiracy theories on social media and raised questions about how smoothly the high-stakes nominating contest would unfold.

Hours before the beginning of the caucuses, the headquarters of the state party received multiple calls from precinct chairs from around the state to report problems with the app.

The state party said at the time that nearly all of the calls were related to user-error problems, such as precincts in areas with bad cellphone service that were having difficulty downloading or logging into the app, or others simply asking about the app's functionality. The party said then that the problems would ultimately not affect the reporting of results.

But Jerry Depew, the Democratic county chairman from Pocahontas County, said that the report line and the help line were the same phone number.

"I had not expected it to be busy at 8 p.m.," he said, when he tried to call in results from his precinct. "But if caucus chairs were calling for help at the same time that easy caucuses were trying to report results, the phones could have been overloaded."

Nick Corasaniti reported from Des Moines, Sheera Frenkel from San Francisco, and Nicole Perlroth from Austin, Tex. Matthew Rosenberg contributed reporting from Washington.