Democratic Primaries
Related: About this forumThe Shoestring App Developer Behind the Iowa Caucus Debacle ..Good read.📘
The small staff of Shadow Inc., a bare-bones operation, raced to create digital tools to benefit progressive campaigns and advocacy groups.
Some employees worked in tech and on Hillary Clintons failed presidential campaign in 2016, but others had much less experience in digital politics, according to their LinkedIn profiles. One of its workers recently was a prep cook for Starbucks. Another was a teacher.
Then, this week, the little-known company brought the first major nominating contest of the election season to a screeching halt when Shadows app failed to work as planned. The ensuing fallout put a spotlight on the disconnect between the startup and its well-funded patron, the progressive nonprofit Acronym.
The debacle at the Iowa caucuses also raises questions about the role of new technologies being deployed within the electoral system.
Shadow, founded by a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer named Gerard Niemira, is part of a complicated web of companies and nonprofits ultimately connected to Acronym, according to people familiar with the matter. This week, Acronym sought to distance itself from Shadow, describing it as a distinct company from the nonprofit.
But over the past year, Acronym and its founder, Tara McGowan, made introductions that allowed Shadow to secure some contracts with state Democratic parties and presidential campaigns, according to people familiar with the matter.
In a Nov. 21 private email to donors and friends, Ms. McGowan described Shadow as a political technology company owned by Acronym. She said Shadow had a trial contract with the Democratic National Committee and would make its flagship product, Lightrail, available to all the state parties and all the presidential candidates, according to the email that was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
A Democratic aide said Lightrail is a benign program that transfers information between different data streams and is common in Democratic politics, distinguishing it from the Iowa app.
Shadows purpose is to create tools to make political organizing more effective since campaigns can have a boom and bust cycle and thus lack ongoing technical expertise and products, said one of the people.
Mr. Niemira, who most recently lived in Denver, didnt respond to requests for comment.
Acronym was founded by Ms. McGowan, a former broadcast journalist who more recently worked for several progressive groups, including President Obamas re-election campaign, and has been the face of the nonprofits splashy initiatives to build a digital strategy to rival President Trumps.
Acronyms affiliated PAC and web of other organizations are funded with millions from high-profile Democrats including director Steven Spielberg and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, people familiar with the matter said. In the wake of the Iowa debacle, Acronym played down its connection to Shadow despite its public ties, including listing the same address of a Washington D.C. WeWork office until a few months ago, according to an employee at the front desk of the building and documents filed with the Colorado secretary of state.
Acronym and Shadow are distinct organizations, with separate teams of employees that work on entirely different programs and projects. Accordingly, Acronyms team was not involved in the development of the app or Shadows work with the Iowa Democratic Party on it, Acronym spokesman Kyle Tharp said in a statement.
Over the past year, Shadow pitched products including a texting app and a data integration tool, but got a mixed reception. Several people who saw the presentations or were briefed on them said the technology wasnt impressive and didnt stand out among the crowd of vendors. Others were sharply critical.
In Iowa, Shadow developed a smartphone app that was intended to help precinct chairs record the results from each round of voting. But many chairs had difficulty downloading the app, which could only be downloaded through two obscure app-testing sites, TestFlight and TestFairy, according to a Jan. 18 email sent to chairs and seen by The Journal. The app was also glitchy once downloaded.
Eventually Iowa officials delayed the outcome of their first-in-the-nation nominating contest.
The Iowa Democratic Party chairman, Troy Price, said that there wasnt a cyber penetration and paper records provide an accurate backup of the results.
An Iowa Democratic Party official said that user errors were responsible in most cases where people had trouble downloading the app and that the party held office hours and had a dedicated staffer to answer questions.
Shadow, in a series of tweets, apologized on Tuesday for the apps performance and said that the company worked as quickly as possible overnight to resolve this issue.
The app developed by Shadow appeared to be built on a tight budget, according to Democrats familiar with the campaign tech ecosystem and engineers. Shadow was paid about $63,000 by the Iowa Democratic Party and $58,000 by the Nevada Democratic Party, according to public records.
Neil Haldar, principal of HALDAR+CO, an app consulting firm, said he would have expected a company to spend at least $150,000 to $200,000 building a mission-critical app that cant fail such as the one built for the Iowa caucuses. Mr. Halder said it was very unusual that Shadow was still completing the app the weekend before the Iowa caucuses.
You have to test that thing six ways to Sunday, said Mr. Haldar, who didnt work with Shadow. If youre pushing an update the weekend before an event, thats not normal for mission-critical software.
In much of the tech industry, engineers often expect an app will malfunction in some way during rollout and have staff on hand to hammer out problems, but the standard is higher with voting technology, he said. Its a culture clash.
Mr. Niemira, Shadows 37-year-old CEO, first got into politics when he interned for Rep. Eliot Engel in West Nyack, N.Y., in 2005. In the following years, he worked for small technology companies.
He got back into politics in earnest when he joined Hillary Clintons 2016 presidential campaign as a senior product manager, based in Brooklyn, N.Y. By the end of the election, he was promoted to director of product, overseeing all of the campaigns tools for field organizers and volunteers, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Acronym in January 2019 acquired a political technology company he co-founded called GroundBase, which had struggled to raise money and had considered shutting down, a person familiar with the matter said.
Relaunched as Shadow, the company secured contracts with state parties and other political campaigns, but the staff was stretched thin, the person said. As it grew, it hired some people without significant experience.
Some employees in mid-2019 finished basic coding or user-design programs that lasted just a few months and didnt have prior technical experience. Employees are scattered across the country in Denver, New York, Seattle and Iowa City, Iowa.
Are we going trust this for voting..not me...to new..Don't let this election be like 2016....
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-shoestring-app-developer-behind-the-iowa-caucus-debacle-11580904037
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Blues Heron
(5,940 posts)some people learn the hard way.
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
Iamaartist
(3,300 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
jmg257
(11,996 posts)voting app contracts.
Blows it big time.
Shoe-string indeed.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Sometimes we need to learn ..ourselves before its to late...on tech.....
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
TryLogic
(1,723 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Undecided
vlyons
(10,252 posts)I'm retired now. But how a major political party could deploy a software Ap that wasn't adequately tested and whose users weren't trained is a mystery to me. There is no fool-proof anything, but paper ballots come pretty close. Are we all so married to our smart phones that we have forgotten how to write? Are we so impatient and media-driven for results that we have not the patience for a proper count? Over the years, I have voted on various systems. Sometimes marking a ballot and then feeding it into a machine reader. Sometimes punching a card and then feeding it into a machine reader. Both of those methods have a hard-copy in case of a challenge.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Iamaartist
(3,300 posts)Learned all from him he owns a software company....
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
htuttle
(23,738 posts)Unless they are contracting with programmers overseas, they almost have to be billing at close to $100/hr for developers (like half for the programmer, half for the company+overhead+insurance, etc -- that's the internal bill-out rate for programmers doing work for the university I'm employed at). Unless they were hiring people with no experience (which it sounds like they might have).
That comes out to about 2 1/2 months of programmer hours, split across a team of several developers.....
So they wrote this in about 3 weeks???
Like 2 sprints? (it's a programming concept -- two weeks of solid coding is a sprint, very loosely defined)
I've coding for almost a quarter of a century, across multiple platforms, and I would never agree to write a mission critical app in under a month, no matter how large the team was.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Iamaartist
(3,300 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
33taw
(2,447 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Iamaartist
(3,300 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
33taw
(2,447 posts)Honestly, someone could have probably written an excel spreadsheet formula that could have handled these results more efficiently. The data could have been called in by county or congressional district and inputted in about an hour.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Iamaartist
(3,300 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Skidmore
(37,364 posts)And dumb phones too.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Iamaartist
(3,300 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
IronLionZion
(45,528 posts)Enough people should have known better
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Iamaartist
(3,300 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Skidmore
(37,364 posts)We have good loyal Democrats here in Iowa who have always strove to work with our fellow citizens toward progressive legislation for over a century.
https://councilbluffscommunityalliance.wordpress.com/iowa/iowas-progressive-history/
Iowa has changed with decades of national Republican policies buffeting our economy. Branstad imported a whole bunch of national ugly into the stare with his second two terms, setting politics on a new trajectory. He saw himself as presidential material.
Iowa Democrats were neglected by the national party for decades, except for during caucus years. Obama and Hillary were the first candidates to share support with our rural county candidates. It was important.
Perhaps people would like to take a break from mocking our demographics and move here. Help us out by returning the favor for launching so many truly progressive ideas for the nation, and I don't mean Bernie Sanders.
I'm just done with the finger pointing, especially since there are more state primaries ahead.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
33taw
(2,447 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Iamaartist
(3,300 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden