As reported yesterday on The BFD, the first Democratic party caucus of the 2020 election went about as exactly as might be expected: a debacle wracked with suspicions of vote-rigging. Plus ça change, and all that.
In further news that should surprise absolutely no one, the key players in the comedy of errors are a literally Shadowy group of Clinton associates and Silicon Valley apparatchiks.
On a tense, chaotic night, with the eyes of the nation trained on the Iowa caucuses, that state’s Democratic Party was counting on a slick new smartphone app to make everything go smoothly.
The app was coded by a tech firm run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, one of them a former Google engineer. It was designed to meet new requirements instituted after that year’s contentious Iowa caucuses, in which Clinton narrowly edged out Bernie Sanders…It turned out to be a crushing failure.
Given the Clintons’ alleged penchant for, ahem, burying their mistakes, it’s somewhat appropriate that their little friends sound like a bunch of 60s Bond villains.
The firm behind the app is Shadow, an affiliate of ACRONYM […]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.
For their next caucus, the Democrats are apparently planning to have the votes tallied by sharks with laser beams on their heads.
In the days leading up to caucus night, Shadow’s app was seen as “a potential target for early election interference,” according to the Des Moines Register.
Instead, a different problem arose […] In an interview with NPR in January, Troy Price, chairman of the Iowa state Democratic Party, declined to say whether it had been tested for vulnerabilities by any independent experts, suggesting the secrecy around it helped to keep it secure from cyberattacks.
Well, they’ve got to keep ahead of those wily Russians somehow. The ultimate in secrecy, apparently, is to keep it so secret that no one even knows if it will work or not.
But all this nonsense does serve a useful purpose: validating the tried-and-tested security of paper ballots. While there has been much enthusiasm in some quarters for internet-based voting, debacles like this only underscore how inherently dangerous it would be.
Marian K. Schneider, president of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election integrity organization, [said][…]“We do not support voting that relies on the internet,” since cybersecurity experts are “pretty unanimous” that it’s not a secure method…
There’s also this:
Among Shadow’s clients is Pete Buttegieg’s presidential campaign, which paid $42,500 to the firm in July 2019 for “software rights and subscriptions,” according to disclosures to the FEC. A spokesman for the campaign says the payment was for a service used to send text messages to voters. The campaigns of Joe Biden and Kirsten Gillibrand, who withdrew from the race last year, also made smaller payments to Shadow.
latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-02-04/clinton-campaign-vets-behind-2020-iowa-caucus-app-snafu
Guess who is the “surprise winner” of the Iowa caucus?
If you enjoyed this BFD article please consider sharing it with your friends.