The lengthy, embarrassing delay in announcing the winner of the 2020 Iowa Caucuses has been a major blemish for Democrats, and Trump and his allies have quickly jumped at the opportunity to use the situation for their own political gain.
On Tuesday, Democrats confirmed that they would be abandoning the faulty app used in gathering votes that led to the delay.
The glitchy app used in the Iowa caucuses was developed by a company called Shadow, Inc. Due to its complete failure to function properly during Tuesday’s caucuses, Nevada state Democrats have confirmed that they won’t be using it at all.
Nevada Democratic Party Chairman William McCurdy II issued a statement explaining the decision:
“We will not be employing the same app or vendor used in the Iowa caucus. We had already developed a series of backups and redundant reporting systems and are currently evaluating the best path forward.”
Tuesday evening, the Iowa caucuses were a bit of a chaotic mess. Caucus leaders, eager to determine the winners of the night’s contest, found the Shadow, Inc. app lacking. Many discovered that they couldn’t properly record the results of their caucus and that the app wouldn’t send the correct information along.
Others had issue logging in to the app. In a test, leaders had been issued a PIN to input to get into the system. However, the night of the conference, a login was needed, not a PIN, and some caucus leaders seemed confused by this switch.
In a series of tweets, Shadow apologized for the delays and confusion. “We sincerely regret the delay in the reporting of the results of last night’s Iowa caucuses and the uncertainty it has caused to the candidates, their campaigns, and Democratic caucus-goers,” Shadow’s tweets read.
According to Shadow, the issue behind the delay “did not affect the underlying caucus results data,” and the company claimed that it “worked as quickly as possible overnight to resolve this issue, and the IDP has worked diligently to verify results.”
Shadow has promised to “apply the lessons learned in the future,” and even alleged that it has fixed the issue in the app that caused the delay.
