The Shoestring App Developer Behind the Iowa Caucus Debacle ..Good read.📘 [View all]

[Iamaartist]

The small staff of Shadow Inc., a bare-bones operation, raced to create digital tools to benefit progressive campaigns and advocacy groups.

Some employees worked in tech and on Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign in 2016, but others had much less experience in digital politics, according to their LinkedIn profiles. One of its workers recently was a prep cook for Starbucks. Another was a teacher.

Then, this week, the little-known company brought the first major nominating contest of the election season to a screeching halt when Shadow’s app failed to work as planned. The ensuing fallout put a spotlight on the disconnect between the startup and its well-funded patron, the progressive nonprofit Acronym.

The debacle at the Iowa caucuses also raises questions about the role of new technologies being deployed within the electoral system.

Shadow, founded by a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer named Gerard Niemira, is part of a complicated web of companies and nonprofits ultimately connected to Acronym, according to people familiar with the matter. This week, Acronym sought to distance itself from Shadow, describing it as a “distinct” company from the nonprofit.

But over the past year, Acronym and its founder, Tara McGowan, made introductions that allowed Shadow to secure some contracts with state Democratic parties and presidential campaigns, according to people familiar with the matter.

In a Nov. 21 private email to donors and friends, Ms. McGowan described Shadow as “a political technology company owned by Acronym.” She said Shadow had a “trial contract” with the Democratic National Committee and would make its flagship product, Lightrail, available to all the state parties and all the presidential candidates, according to the email that was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

A Democratic aide said Lightrail is a “benign program” that transfers information between different data streams and is common in Democratic politics, distinguishing it from the Iowa app.




Shadow’s purpose is to create tools to make political organizing more effective since campaigns can have a “boom and bust” cycle and thus lack ongoing technical expertise and products, said one of the people.

Mr. Niemira, who most recently lived in Denver, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Acronym was founded by Ms. McGowan, a former broadcast journalist who more recently worked for several progressive groups, including President Obama’s re-election campaign, and has been the face of the nonprofit’s splashy initiatives to build a digital strategy to rival President Trump’s.

Acronym’s affiliated PAC and web of other organizations are funded with millions from high-profile Democrats including director Steven Spielberg and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, people familiar with the matter said. In the wake of the Iowa debacle, Acronym played down its connection to Shadow despite its public ties, including listing the same address of a Washington D.C. WeWork office until a few months ago, according to an employee at the front desk of the building and documents filed with the Colorado secretary of state.

“Acronym and Shadow are distinct organizations, with separate teams of employees that work on entirely different programs and projects. Accordingly, Acronym’s team was not involved in the development of the app or Shadow’s work with the Iowa Democratic Party on it,” Acronym spokesman Kyle Tharp said in a statement.

Over the past year, Shadow pitched products including a texting app and a data integration tool, but got a mixed reception. Several people who saw the presentations or were briefed on them said the technology wasn’t impressive and didn’t stand out among the crowd of vendors. Others were sharply critical.

In Iowa, Shadow developed a smartphone app that was intended to help precinct chairs record the results from each round of voting. But many chairs had difficulty downloading the app, which could only be downloaded through two obscure app-testing sites, TestFlight and TestFairy, according to a Jan. 18 email sent to chairs and seen by The Journal. The app was also glitchy once downloaded.

Eventually Iowa officials delayed the outcome of their first-in-the-nation nominating contest.

The Iowa Democratic Party chairman, Troy Price, said that there wasn’t a cyber penetration and paper records provide an accurate backup of the results.

An Iowa Democratic Party official said that user errors were responsible in most cases where people had trouble downloading the app and that the party held office hours and had a dedicated staffer to answer questions.

Shadow, in a series of tweets, apologized on Tuesday for the app’s performance and said that the company “worked as quickly as possible overnight to resolve this issue.”

The app developed by Shadow appeared to be built on a tight budget, according to Democrats familiar with the campaign tech ecosystem and engineers. Shadow was paid about $63,000 by the Iowa Democratic Party and $58,000 by the Nevada Democratic Party, according to public records.

Neil Haldar, principal of HALDAR+CO, an app consulting firm, said he would have expected a company to spend at least $150,000 to $200,000 building a “mission-critical app” that can’t fail such as the one built for the Iowa caucuses. Mr. Halder said it was very unusual that Shadow was still completing the app the weekend before the Iowa caucuses.

“You have to test that thing six ways to Sunday,” said Mr. Haldar, who didn’t work with Shadow. “If you’re pushing an update the weekend before an event, that’s not normal for mission-critical software.”

In much of the tech industry, engineers often expect an app will malfunction in some way during rollout and have staff on hand to hammer out problems, but the standard is higher with voting technology, he said. “It’s a culture clash.”




Mr. Niemira, Shadow’s 37-year-old CEO, first got into politics when he interned for Rep. Eliot Engel in West Nyack, N.Y., in 2005. In the following years, he worked for small technology companies.

He got back into politics in earnest when he joined Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign as a senior product manager, based in Brooklyn, N.Y. By the end of the election, he was promoted to director of product, overseeing all of the campaign’s tools for field organizers and volunteers, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Acronym in January 2019 acquired a political technology company he co-founded called GroundBase, which had struggled to raise money and had considered shutting down, a person familiar with the matter said.

Relaunched as Shadow, the company secured contracts with state parties and other political campaigns, but the staff was stretched thin, the person said. As it grew, it hired some people without significant experience.


Some employees in mid-2019 finished basic coding or user-design programs that lasted just a few months and didn’t have prior technical experience. Employees are scattered across the country in Denver, New York, Seattle and Iowa City, Iowa.



Are we going trust this for voting..not me...to new..Don't let this election be like 2016....


https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-shoestring-app-developer-behind-the-iowa-caucus-debacle-11580904037