Tech Issues
The Dreaded App
The main issue surrounding the night of the 2020 caucus in Iowa was the application built for the Democrats in Iowa to be able to tally results quickly and with more accuracy, promote accessibility for those that may need the accommodation, and help produce final results faster and cut down on the need for volunteers and manpower. In the end, it did none of the things it set out to do, and in fact it caused so many issues that the DNC in Washington had to declare a state of emergency and route all calls to their headquarters. Let’s explore the app itself and why it failed so spectacularly.
Untested from an Unknown Company
The issues start, like most no code QuickBase projects, with the people who developed it. The company, for some reason, was kept secret from the public until a while after the results had been reported, when it was revealed that a company named Shadow, Inc. had developed the IowaReporterApp, on commission for a little over sixty-three thousand dollars, the public responded with a resounding “who?” That was because the developers were both unknown and inexperienced. Having released the application without testing either its main functionality of reporting data, or even the ability to login. This would lead to people actually giving up on trying to use it and just using whatever was at hand to record the results. For those that did actually managed to get in and log their data, the app only ended up reporting partial data.
Issues with Logging in and 2FA
At the start of the night, many people found themselves entirely unable to login to the application and started calling into the Iowa Democrat’s “boiler room” / call center for support with the application. The only issue being that the people who developed the application didn’t pass along troubleshooting instructions, nor were they available to help troubleshoot. The volunteers in the call center started telling the hundreds of people calling in with issues to just hand-write out the results and call them back in to report them, or email the results.
That wasn’t the end of the situation, though—as people were trying to get information off of the application, it turned out that it required two-factor authentication to verify the user logging in was who they said they were. Since volunteers in the call center weren’t allowed to have their personal phones on them for security reasons, they ended up just passing around a spare iPad to verify users one person at a time.
Incorrect and Partial Data
As common sense should dictate, an untested app being fed into an unknown, and apparently buggy identity provider for user verification and result verification is going to fail at one point along that journey, if not at every step, and fail it did. For those lucky few that were able to login and actually both log and report results, the data they sent out was only partial, and allegedly was sometimes entirely wrong or altered. This caused a massive delay, as after it was found out that some, if not all, the data coming in was inaccurate, everything had to be recounted manually and double-checked. However, even going through manually and checking everything didn’t produce trust-worthy results, as according to publications like the Associated Press, there were still enough large inconsistencies in the data to the point that they were unable to actually say who won in the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucus
The Fallout For Shadow Inc.
When all the dust had settled, the delays were over, and the final results were in, the public was fuming about Shadow Inc and their failed application. People from all walks of life were sending hate their way, some of which can be seen below, talking about how badly they messed up, how companies like them were the reasons that people distrusted technology, people even started coming out and questioning the financial ties they had to former candidate Pete Buttigieg and his sudden high standing in the caucus. All of the public outcry and media attention led them to rebrand entirely as BlueLink. A company offering similar, if not the same, services.