‘I’m really disappointed that some of our technology created an issue that made the caucus difficult…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) The CEO of the company behind the failed app that contributed to the disastrous Iowa Democratic primary caucus on Monday said he feels “terrible” about what happened.
“I’m really disappointed that some of our technology created an issue that made the caucus difficult,” Shadow Inc. CEO Gerrard Niemira told Bloomberg News. “We feel really terrible about that.”
No one expected the app to underperform, Niemira said. “The app was sound and good. All the data that was produced by calculations performed by the app was correct. It did the job it was supposed to do, which is help precinct chairs in the field do the math correctly,” he explained.
The problem was “a bug in the code,” Niemira admitted. Somehow, the bug blocked precinct data from being transmitted to the state party’s “data warehouse.” The result was a “catastrophic” failure, he admitted.
Niemira also said that this problem could and should have been prevented: “Yes, it was anticipate-able. Yes, we put in measures to test it. Yes, it still failed. And we own that.”
Technological complications resulted in a massive delay on Monday night. Results weren’t released until the next day, and as of Wednesday, the total numbers are still not in.
“We determined with certainty that the underlying data collected via the app was sound,” Troy Price, the state Democratic chairman, said in a statement. “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. This issue was identified and fixed.”
The delay deepened the fissures between the Democratic presidential candidates. Both Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders declared victory, citing internal polling.
The official results show Buttigieg in the lead right now, with Sanders right on his tail. But Buttigieg’s past financial connections to Shadow Inc. led many Sanders supporters to wonder whether Buttigieg had “rigged” the caucus results.
Fellow front-runners Elizabeth Warren (18 percent) and Joe Biden (15 percent) trailed behind.