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Feb. 04-- Feb. 4--The 2020 election season kicked off Monday in Iowa, and many are hoping it's not a harbinger of things to come.
Despite the widely held opinion of election security experts that Internet-connected devices should be avoided where possible -- to say nothing of repeated warnings from federal officials about cybersecurity threats -- the Iowa Democratic Party used a brand-new mobile app to tally and transmit primary election results. It didn't go well.
Results were still coming in as of this writing, almost 20 hours after polls closed, because an apparent coding error in the app led to discrepancies, forcing officials to record totals by hand. According to a public statement Monday night from Iowa Democratic Party Chair Tony Price, there was no indication of a security breach, and the app was recording data accurately, but it was reporting only partial data. He said the coding error was eventually fixed, but the party's contingency plan to enter data manually took longer than expected. For some, the damage was already done.
The Nevada Democratic Party had contracted the same company that produced the app -- Shadow Inc. -- for the same service, and the party's verified Twitter account revealed on Tuesday that they no longer plan to use the app for the state's primary on Feb. 22.
On the company's website, CEO Gerard Niemira said in a statement that he regrets the delay.
"As the Iowa Democratic Party has confirmed, the underlying data and collection process via Shadow's mobile caucus app was sound and accurate, but our process to transmit that caucus results data generated via the app to the IDP was not," the statement reads.
Candidates who had spent millions campaigning in Iowa went to...