New Details on how deep app developer was with establishment

[booley]

just to give you some of the quick history here, after the 2016 election, there was a lot of discussion about the Trump campaign besting the Hillary Clinton campaign on digital outreach, on digital advertising on Facebook and other social media platforms. So a number of mostly Hillary Clinton campaign alumni formed a for-profit company and a suite, a group called ACRONYM/PACRONYM. That’s a suite of both a super PAC and a dark money group. These individuals raised tens of millions of dollars, largely from big Democratic donors, folks on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, in Hollywood. And they promised a robust response to the Trump agenda, to face Trump in 2020.

Last year, in January 2019, they acquired this company Groundbase. They renamed it Shadow. It’s fully affiliated with this ACRONYM/PACRONYM group. And they had a very small staff. But as we understand — we talked to a number of individuals in the Democratic Party and other officials close to this firm — they used their leverage with high-level Democratic donors, with Democratic establishment types, to quickly secure this contract with the Nevada Democratic Party and the Iowa Democratic Party to deploy this app. They had a very small number of developers working on this app in secret. And as you mentioned, the Nevada Democratic Party has now canceled their plans to use this app.

The Iowa Democratic Party released very little information about this app. We’ve heard reports that folks were told about the app even on the very day of the caucus. They had no idea how to use it, how to report the system. And there were serious bugs in the app. It would shut off while the caucus was being run. So, a plethora of problems. But this was created by a relatively small group of Democratic insiders, former campaign staff, again, to Hillary Clinton.

There has been also a little bit of talk about conflict of interest. There’s no discussion — there’s no evidence so far that this app was hacked or there was any of those type of cybersecurity problems. That’s still being evaluated, but there’s no evidence of that. But there is some question about the appearance of conflict of interest. Pete Buttigieg’s campaign has paid over $40,000 to this company, Shadow. Joe Biden’s campaign has worked a little bit with this company. But for a company that is expected to be a neutral arbiter, to be literally developing the app to tabulate the votes, I think it’s important to have a neutral, objective entity developing this, not a company that’s only working with a few of the campaigns and not the others.

Full interview at Democracy Now!

[RandySF]

1. They fucked up

No excuse, but no conspiracy.

[underpants]

2. I heard that this morning on Democracy Now

Very telling

[George II]

3. Democracy Now is not an impartial, objective source.

[comradebillyboy]

4. More conspiracy theories from the Sanders camp.

The caucus set up was tailor made for Bernie. Bernie has close to 100% name ID in Iowa. Bernie outspent everybody by a big margin in Iowa and still didn't get the job done.

[LanternWaste]

5. You guys are laying the groundwork for conspiracies now, eh?

We get it... Bernie didn't win, so of course the game is rigged.