Sandy Dockendorff, a former state rule chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, took her role as precinct captain seriously.

So when she was asked to try an early version of the app to report caucus results, she did. She tested it “vigorously,” she said, running it through several scenarios. She could never get it past one in particular: resolving a three-way tie between viable candidates.

She flagged the issue and received an updated version of the app on Saturday, two days before the caucuses.

On Monday, she was still unable to report her final results through the app. The problem: Her caucus site had a three-way tie. When the app told Dockendorff to hold a game of chance to break the tie and force a new alignment, the app would not accept the new, final result.

She ended up spending two hours on hold trying to report the results by phone. When she finally got through to the Iowa Democratic Party, it took her “three minutes to verify who I was … three minutes to send results, one minute to parrot back to make sure they had it correctly, and that was it.”

Tom Courtney, co-chair of the Des Moines County Democrats, also received an early version of the app.

He also tried to test it, but he could “never could get the practice thing to come up.” So he hadn’t run through any simulations of what he’d do on Election Day, he said.

“The night of the caucus came, my secretary and I got together and couldn’t get on,” Courtney said. “At that point, I called somebody locally, and they said: ‘Why don’t you just do it the old-fashioned way. Call it in.’ ”

The Iowa Democratic Party had set up a phone system where precincts could report results, but Courtney found the line swamped.

“So I took [the app] home with me and tried it again, I suppose for a half-hour, and I said heck, I’ll do this tomorrow,” he said.

In the morning, he emailed and texted his results to a member of the IDP, but as of Tuesday afternoon, Courtney had not gotten word that they’d been received.