An Analysis of the App That Failed the Iowa Democratic Caucus ⇥ vice.com
Jason Koebler, Joseph Cox, and Emanuel Maiberg, Vice:
The app used to report early results in Iowa’s Democratic Presidential primary caucus was rudimentary in many ways, according to analyses by multiple Android app development experts and cybersecurity professionals who decompiled and studied the app after it was obtained by Motherboard.
The app, called IowaReporterApp and developed by a company called Shadow Inc., malfunctioned during the caucus, causing mass chaos and delaying the public reporting of results until Tuesday evening. The app was designed to rapidly report early results, not tabulate final vote counts. That means its failure will not result in the election result being altered.
The backend of Iowa Caucus app is named “idp-2020-dev”
People usually only name the non-production backend as “dev”
I have a feeling they might be out of time and had to ship the dev build straight to prod for democracy
Some consultant is probably sitting on a beach somewhere in awe of their bank balance after they managed to convince party and election officials that digital tabulation would be so much simpler and faster than pen and paper.