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 new smartphone app to make everything go smoothly.

In 2016, for the first time, precinct chairs used a smartphone app built by Microsoft to relay results to party headquarters, enabling faster reporting than communicating via telephone hotline. This year, with the state party promising to disclose more granular data than in the past, the job of coding the app went to a fledgling tech firm run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.