Shadow CEO: ‘We feel really terrible’ about Iowa caucus app flap

The CEO of a company behind the app that failed Monday night as it was being used to report results in the Iowa Democratic caucuses says his team feels “terrible” for contributing to the chaos.

As officials in Iowa continued recording caucus results Wednesday morning, Shadow Inc. CEO Gerard Niemira told Bloomberg News that he was “really disappointed” in the app’s performance on Monday night.

“I’m really disappointed that some of our technology created an issue that made the caucus difficult,” he said, adding: “We feel really terrible about that.”

“The app was sound and good,” he continued. “All the data that was produced by calculations performed by the app was correct. It did the job it was supposed to do, which is help precinct chairs in the field do the math correctly. The problem was caused by a bug in the code that transmits results data into the state party’s data warehouse.”

That led to “catastrophic” failure as party officials around the state were attempting to report caucus results late into the evening Monday night, Niemira added.

“We’d had people using this app for weeks,” Niemira said. “What we were seeing early on caucus day was people having difficulty logging in for the first time.”

“Yes, it was anticipate-able,” he continued. “Yes, we put in measures to test it. Yes, it still failed. And we own that.”

His comments come as just 71 percent of precincts in Iowa had finished tabulating results as of Wednesday morning, long after results were initially expected and as most candidates have moved on to campaigning in New Hampshire, site of the next primary contest.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) looked to take the top slots in the Iowa caucuses, with the two tied in delegate counts and Buttigieg holding a slight lead in state delegate equivalents as many of the most populated areas of the state have yet to finish reporting results.