Tech firm started by Clinton campaign veterans is linked to Iowa caucus reporting debacle

[LiberalArkie]

An app created by a tech firm run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign is taking heat for the unprecedented delay in reporting Democratic caucus results from Iowa.

The firm behind the app reportedly is Shadow, an affiliate of ACRONYM, a Democratic nonprofit founded in 2017 “to educate, inspire, register, and mobilize voters,” according to its website. Shadow started out as Groundbase, a tech developer co-founded by Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, who worked for the tech team on Clinton’s campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination.

Niemira had previously worked at kiva.org, a nonprofit that makes loans to entrepreneurs and others in the developing world, and Davis had spent eight years as an engineer at Google. ACRONYM’s founder and CEO is Tara McGowan, a former journalist and digital producer with President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign.

Designed to modernize a system that relied on precinct chairs phoning in their results, Shadow’s caucus app was seen as “a potential target for early election interference,” according to the Des Moines Register.

Sn ip

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-02-04/clinton-campaign-vets-behind-2020-iowa-caucus-app-snafu

[snowybirdie]

2. Aha!

Another way to diss Hillary!

[Cuthbert Allgood]

16. So talking about Sanders campaign connected people is fine.

But when people from Clinton's campaign do things that aren't great, that's somehow bad. Interesting.

[Devil Child]

3. No cause for concern here!

Move right along, nothing to see nothing to see.

[lapfog_1]

4. why do they need "an app for that"?

The count at the caucus site is done by hand.

A calculator is needed to take total participation and find the magic 15% number.

Any group under that 15% disperses to other groups already over 15%.

Another count is done of each group.

Finally a simple division with some horrible rounding (in my opinion) is done to determine delegates.

Someone writes this down on a piece of paper... and calls a phone number (manned by 100 ladies from the League of Women Voters for example)... the tally of delegates is transmitted. Someone else at Iowa Democratic HQ tallies the delegates (and the raw counts) and makes an announcement for the media.

bingo... done. No chaos.

[redstatebluegirl]

5. Some Democrats or so called democrats,

are more obsessed with Secretary Clinton than Trump.

[apcalc]

6. And you bring Clinton's nAme into it why?

It serves no purpose.

An attemp to disrupt, maybe?

[LiberalArkie]

8. I did not.. the LA Times did..

I might suggest you read the article

[apcalc]

12. Thank you for the clarification. A pox on them then. Nope, going no further.

[ismnotwasm]

7. Imma head on back to Twitter

The CTs are more interesting. Actually I’m
Heading to work, so I don’t get to play whose fault was it today

[LiberalArkie]

9. For a CT, I favor the system broke because their favorite person was not winning.

[greenjar_01]

10. "their"

[Sunsky]

14. You know this BS needs to stop

I am tried of this crap. Do you realize that this is just one primary election and "their" candidate might ultimately be "our" candidate? What happens then? There's no us vs them in the Democratic primaries. Save it for the general.
All these rumors being spread by our own, against our own . It's like an autoimmune disease, we are eating our damn selves.

[CentralMass]

11. Oy.

[booley]

13. Don't use conspiracy when incompetence will suffice

One thing that does bug me about some of my fellow Bernie supporters is how primed they are to believe conspiracies.

Although if we are being actually truly honest, you can't blame them.

This was probably what it appears to be. combination of infatuation with technology and an insider figuring out how to get Tom Perez to write him a check led to an app that wasn't' up to to the task.

Still, the optics here aren't going to make the suspicions seem any less plausible.

[LiberalArkie]

17. The fault has to be on the person(s) who decided to go with only the app instead of running

the old method and new method at the same time. I think the apps just over whelmed the server they had. But they would have known that if they had run it before.

[denem]

15. The Clenis!

[Dennis Donovan]

18. .

You mean the same Clenis that killed Vince Foster?

[LiberalArkie]

20. Nope, just some of their supporters.

[Bayard]

19. That dang Clinton again!

In league with Obama.