Ex-Hillary staffer at heart of Iowa’s zapped app
A mobile app being blamed for the collapse of the Iowa caucuses was created by a tech firm run by a veteran of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign — an embarrassing launch the company said it “sincerely” regrets.
The Iowa Democratic Party paid about $60,000 for the app, according to campaign finance records. It was supposed to “ensure accuracy in a complex reporting process,” but instead led to unprecedented reporting delays as results from Monday’s caucuses could not be transmitted. Final results didn’t start rolling in until late Tuesday afternoon.
Shadow Inc. — the tech company behind the app — launched in 2019 with backing from political nonprofit ACRONYM, according to a statement from the nonprofit.
ACRONYM founder and CEO Tara McGowan, a Newport, R.I., native, said on Twitter that Shadow is “an independent company ACRONYM invested in. We don’t have any information beyond the public statements the IDP has put out + like all of you, eagerly await learning what happened and who won the IA caucus.”
McGowan said on a podcast published last week on ACRONYM’s website that ACRONYM was Shadow’s “sole investor.” She also identified ex-Hillary Clinton campaign staffer Gerard Niemira as the leader of Shadow Inc. on the same podcast.
Niemira said in a statement released Tuesday on Shadow’s website: “We sincerely regret the delay in the reporting of the results of (the) Iowa caucuses and the uncertainty it has caused to the candidates, their campaigns, and Democratic caucus-goers.
“We will apply the lessons learned in the future,” he added, “and have already corrected the underlying technology issue. We take these issues very seriously, and are committed to improving and evolving to support the Democratic Party’s goal of modernizing its election processes.”
McGowan, who lists herself as a former journalist, married then-Hillary Clinton campaign staffer and current Buttigeig strategist Michael Halle in 2015, according to a Providence Journal marriage announcement and Halle’s Twitter account.
It’s a connection Democratic pundit Michael Ceraso said “undermines efforts” of the Buttigieg campaign, but one he said he doesn’t think is nefarious.
John Cluverius, a UMass Lowell political science professor, added it was an unfortunate debut for the app maker and Iowa: “What it appears to me, is that the party didn’t make a substantial investment in testing the app itself. (Bernie) Sanders supporters are probably looking for conspiracy theories, but in most cases, they overestimate how intelligent and how diabolical people are.”