Organizers running the precincts did not get to test the mobile app until just hours before voting began

A smartphone app designed to transfer results from Iowa’s local precincts to the state Democratic party is at the centre of dramatic delays to the vote count.

There were reports that some precinct chairs were unable to use the app and were calling in the results instead using a phone hotline, but were encountering long waits.

Organizers running the precinct caucuses did not get to test the mobile app they were to use to report results until just hours before voting began. The Iowa Democratic party has said it will release the results on Tuesday.

Play Video 1:34 'Iowa, you have shocked the nation': Democrats remain hopeful despite results chaos – video

According to MSNBC, security measures around the app, which was distributed directly to volunteers, caused a significant amount of friction. Workers were reportedly expected to download a file to their Android phones, enable a setting that allows for the installation of apps from untrusted sources, and then bypass prompts warning that doing so could cause a security breach.

The process, known as “sideloading”, allows the distribution of an app to be limited, since it doesn’t need to be uploaded to the iOS App Store or the Google Play Store. But some workers apparently balked at the requirements, falling back to the overloaded phone lines.

State party officials had said they would not be sending the new mobile app to precinct chairs for downloading until just before the caucuses to narrow the window for any interference. Some precinct chairs said they had trouble downloading or logging into the app and didn’t use it.

One Iowa precinct chairwoman told the Associated Press she did not use the new app because of problems trying to download and test it. “We came to a consensus not to use it,” said Ruth Thompson, who chaired a precinct at Lincoln High School in Des Moines.



Thompson said that she also did not try to report her site’s results over the phone after hearing reports of long delays in answering the line at state headquarters.

Precinct organizers were supposed to log in to the smartphone app with a special pin number and then use the app to determine viability thresholds and report results, according to the Associated Press. An Iowa Democratic party manual had told caucus organizers that the app was the “preferred method” for reporting results. It listed a single phone number for those who chose to call them in from the 1,678 statewide precincts.

Instead, veteran caucusgoers at Thompson’s site used calculators to compute the delegate allocation and then texted a photo of the result to Polk county Democratic party officials, who drove it to state party headquarters.

Sean Bagniewski, chair of the Polk county Democrats, told the New York Times that the party hadn’t conducted app-only training as of Thursday. Jerry Depew, the Democratic chair in Pocahontas county, told the Times the state party used the same number as its helpline and to report results, which may have explained why it was difficult to reach party officials. Another volunteer in Iowa City told the Washington Post caucus organizers were waiting four hours on the phone to report the results to the party.

Before the caucuses, four Democratic county chairs had told Bloomberg News that some precinct officials had been unable to download or log in to the app. Some experts told NPR and the Wall Street Journal earlier this year that the lack of public information made it difficult to have confidence in the app.

The app was developed by a group backed by a Democratic digital non-profit that has grown rapidly in recent years, HuffPost reported on Tuesday. The Nevada Democratic party, set to hold its caucuses on 22 February, paid the same firm for website development, according to HuffPost. The group released a statement early Tuesday morning distancing itself from the app.

After the delay in reporting the results was confirmed, Mandy McClure, a spokesperson for the Iowa Democratic party, stressed the results had not been hacked.

The party found inconsistencies in the three sets of results, McClure said in a statement. She said the party was using photos of the results and a “paper trail” to verify them.

“This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or intrusion,” she said in a statement. “The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.”

The Iowa caucuses are complex. In previous years, the Iowa Democratic party has only reported the final delegate counts that each candidate receives, which are important in calculating the number of national delegates a candidate receives. National delegates eventually nominate the party’s chosen presidential candidate.

On Monday, for the first time, the party was also reporting the number of people who caucus for the various candidates during the two rounds in the process.

After the delay, the campaign for presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden wrote to the state Democratic party saying there were “considerable flaws” in the reported system.

Donald Trump’s campaign and surrogates quickly seized on the glitch to suggest that Democrats were tampering with the caucus results. There is no evidence the results were compromised in any way.

The claims about tampering came after conservatives amplified an untrue claim that the state’s voter rolls were filled with ineligible voters. There is concern that Trump and other actors will weaponize misinformation to undermine the integrity of the 2020 election results if he loses.

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