Clouded by doubts on a chaotic day-after, Democratic Party officials planned to release “at least 50 percent” of Iowa’s delayed presidential caucus results by 5:00 p.m Eastern on Tuesday, according to details shared with campaigns on a private conference call.
The news did little to stem rising confusion and concern more than 12 hours after voting ended without the release of a single result in the opening contest of the Democrats 2020 primary season.
At the center of the fiasco is a liberal tech company named ACRONYM. Based in Washington, D.C., the firm has ties to multiple veterans from insider former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign.
“The firm behind the app reportedly is Shadow, an affiliate of ACRONYM, a Democratic nonprofit founded in 2017 ‘to educate, inspire, register, and mobilize voters,’” The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.
“Shadow started out as Groundbase, a tech developer co-founded by Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, who worked for the tech team on Clinton’s campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination,” The L.A. Times report continued. “Niemira had previously worked at kiva.org, a nonprofit that makes loans to entrepreneurs and others in the developing world, and Davis had spent eight years as an engineer at Google.”
“ACRONYM’s founder and CEO is Tara McGowan, a former journalist and digital producer with President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign.”
Iowa State party chairman Troy Price informed campaigns that he would release at least 50% of all caucus results at 5:00 p.m. Eastern, but he declined to answer pointed questions from frustrated campaign representatives about when the party would release the full results or how it could ensure their integrity — even whether it would be a matter of days or weeks.
“We will continue to work through the process,” Price said. “We want to get some results out there.”
The party’s caucus crisis was an embarrassing twist after months of promoting the contest as a chance for Democrats to find some clarity in a jumbled field with no clear front-runner.
Instead, caucus day ended with no winner, no official results, and many fresh questions about the competency of Democratic Party leadership.
In a letter to campaigns Tuesday, the party said the data collected by the app was “sound,” but data it was reported was incomplete.
“While the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data,” Price told campaigns in a somewhat delayed effort to explain the issue. “This issue was identified and fixed. The application’s reporting issue did not impact the ability of precinct chairs to report data accurately.”
President Donald Trump eagerly seized on the Democrats’ problems.
The Democrat Caucus is an unmitigated disaster. Nothing works, just like they ran the Country. Remember the 5 Billion Dollar Obamacare Website, that should have cost 2% of that. The only person that can claim a very big victory in Iowa last night is “Trump”.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 4, 2020
FURTHER READING: Democrats left scrambling after Iowa disaster
The Associated Press contributed to this article