Iowa Democrats' First Failure Was Not Testing That Calamitous App

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

At the center of the vote-reporting delays that turned Monday’s Iowa caucus into an embarrassing night of interminable conspiracymongering and cable-news meltdowns is a mobile app that precincts tried to use to send in their results to the state’s Democratic Party. The app, which was built in the past two months by an obscure Democratic tech firm named Shadow, was supposed to make it faster for officials to collect and relay voter data from roughly 1,700 caucus sites. Officials blamed a “coding issue” for inconsistencies they found in the reporting of three sets of data from each precinct, although they said the paper trail of the actual caucus results was uncorrupted. In addition to that issue, multiple Democratic county chairs told Bloomberg they also had trouble downloading and logging in to the app, while people working the caucuses said they were unable to get through to the backup hotline to report results via phone.

Shadow released a statement on Tuesday apologizing for the debacle:

Link to tweet

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It’s still unclear what exactly went wrong with the app, but all of these issues appear to have something in common: The Iowa Democratic Party clearly wasn’t prepared for any possible issues with the app and a more involved method of vote reporting introduced this year—and sure enough, it reportedly turns out that the app was never tested on a statewide scale. Shadow, which is run by alumni of the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns as well as Google, was paid $60,000 to develop the app, but it had just two months after party officials decided to abandon plans to report results over the phone.*

It’s best practice to test any new software in low-consequence, real-world situations for bugs or potential user errors that would otherwise be difficult to detect in the vacuum of the development process. It is certainly a good idea when the software’s only use is a high-stakes, one-off event of national political importance.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elections-2020/iowa-democrats-first-failure-was-not-testing-that-calamitous-app/ar-BBZEmDG?li=BBZdWbk