The mysterious tech firm responsible for creating the app that caused a widespread delay in reporting the results of the Iowa caucuses is hiring a “client success representative.”
Shadow Inc., which is run by several veterans of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign, is looking for help managing its client relationships and “responding to incoming requests for help.” The job posting was made public only hours after the group botched the first contest of the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination.
Little is known about the company or its investors, apart from the fact that its chief executive officer is Gerard Niemira, the former director of product for Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Also affiliated with the outfit is the former secretary of state’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, who was part of a group that tested the app ahead of Monday’s disaster.
Last year, Shadow was hired by the Iowa Democrat Party to create an app to improve transparency and reporting times for the first-in-the-nation caucus. Instead of improving the process, the app apparently created more trouble. On Monday, precinct chairs across Iowa’s nearly 1700 caucus districts found themselves unable to input results via the app. This failure forced the state party to conduct a “quality control” assessment of the results, delaying the final tally well after the contest had officially ended.
“While the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data,” a spokesperson for the Iowa Democrats said on Tuesday. “We have determined that this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system.”
Complicating the situation is that numerous precinct chairpersons have admitted they received little training before the state party pushed the technology on them.