By Feuerherd
The CEO of the tech company whose app wreaked havoc in the Iowa caucus on Monday night apologized for the debacle on Tuesday, saying they “feel really terrible” for the snafu.
Gerard Niemira, the head of Shadow Inc., told Bloomberg News that the reporting problems were caused by a bug that transports results to the party’s main database.
“I’m really disappointed that some of our technology created an issue that made the caucus difficult. We feel really terrible about that,” Niemira told Bloomberg.
“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 added.
“The problem was caused by a bug in the code that transmits results data into the state party’s data warehouse,” Niemira told Bloomberg. The glitch, he added, “had catastrophic impact.”
Niemira had previously boasted about creating digital tools for Hillary Clinton’s botched 2016 presidential bid before being contracted by Iowa’s Democratic Party in 2019.
Iowa Democratic officials have blamed the delay in the release of Monday night’s results on the app, with party chair Troy Price saying it was only reporting partial data due to a “coding issue.”
Precinct chairs across the state experienced problems downloading or logging into the app, one of the ways they were supposed to be able to send the results from their smaller, individual caucuses to the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP).
