The smartphone application blamed in part for the ongoing delay in reporting results of the Monday Iowa caucuses is linked with key Iowa and national Democrats associated with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The revelation came as the Nevada Democratic Party announced Tuesday it was jettisoning plans to use an app from the same source in its Feb. 22 caucuses.

The app was issued by Jimmy Hickey of Shadow Inc., metadata of the program that the Des Moines Register analyzed Tuesday shows. Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, who worked for Clinton’s 2016 campaign, co-founded Shadow.

Company officials did not respond Tuesday to a request for comment. But a short time after the Des Moines Register published a story revealing the link, the company, whose identity the Iowa Democratic Party had not previously disclosed, tweeted an apology.

"We sincerely regret the delay in the reporting of the results of last night's Iowa caucuses and the uncertainty it has caused to the candidates, their campaigns, and Democratic caucus-goers," Shadow's message said.

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Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price worked as Clinton’s 2016 Iowa political director. He did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday about the relationship between the party and Shadow, which it paid $63,184 for website development and travel expenses, according to reports filed with the Iowa Ethics & Campaign Disclosure Board.

The Nevada party paid Shadow $50,143 for “monetary expenses,” filings with the Nevada secretary of state show. The filings provided no further details.

It was unclear whether the Iowa Democratic Party had chosen the app on its own, or had received guidance from the national party. Shadow's website indicates close ties to the National Democratic Party.

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“When a light is shining, Shadows are a constant companion,” it says. “We see ourselves as building a long-term, side-by-side ‘Shadow’ of tech infrastructure to the Democratic Party and the progressive community at large.”

Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez on Tuesday issued a statement condemning the failure of the app, saying, "What happened last night should never happen again."

"It is clear that the app in question did not function adequately," Perez said. "It will not be used in Nevada or anywhere else during the primary election process. The technology vendor must provide absolute transparent accounting of what went wrong."

Security watchdogs had called on Iowa Democrats to be more transparent about the development and testing of the app prior to Monday’s caucuses. But Democrats declined to name the developer or provide testing details, saying top cybersecurity experts advised against releasing too much information because it could result in the vendor being targeted.

Shadow collected $153,768 in 2019 from seven different Democratic or advocacy campaigns, mostly for technology, software and subscription services such as text messaging, according to Federal Election Commission data. Among them were the presidential campaigns of former Vice President Joe Biden and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, as well as the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, according to the federal reports.

Price on Tuesday morning issued a statement saying that because of a coding problem, the app reported only partial data.

"We have determined that this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system,” Price said. “This issue was identified and fixed. The application’s reporting issue did not impact the ability of precinct chairs to report data accurately."

Efforts to confirm the count continued Tuesday, with the party releasing partial results in the Tuesday afternoon.

There were numerous complaints Tuesday from county- and precinct-level Democratic chairs that the app had been troublesome in the lead-up to the caucuses, and again on caucus night. Many said they had attempted to report their results by phone instead of using it, but encountered long hold times and dropped calls.

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Deb Copeland, a Des Moines precinct chair, said her team chose to report results via phone.

“I didn’t even bother” to download the app “because we had an informal Facebook group and people were saying they couldn’t get it to do anything and had so many questions,” Copeland said.

Nevada Democratic Party officials on Tuesday confirmed they will not use an original Caucus Day app developed by Shadow.

Spokeswoman Molly Forgey said the party was evaluating its options and did not rule out using another app to tabulate results. She did not immediately provide details on the other options, beyond noting that the party did not have a list of potential replacement vendors that it was "pursuing or talking to."

The party had previously announced plans to use an app to tabulate results at its caucuses, as Iowa did, along with a second app that would be pre-loaded onto tablets available for voters to use at caucus sites during four days of early voting.

The Iowa caucus app did not appear to have anything programmed into it that “was malicious or necessarily noteworthy,” but there were multiple security concerns associated with its use, said Tim LeMaster, director of systems engineering at Lookout, a cybersecurity company based in San Francisco.

LeMaster said the program was “sideloaded” onto user phones, a term used to describe apps that do not come from a source like Google Play Store that generally vets programs for cyber security. That means the rigor of the caucus app's testing remains unknown, he said.

In addition, the program required users to turn off some security controls in order for their phones to accept the application, LeMaster noted.

“There are a number of issues you have to consider when you look at how this was planned and thought about,” LeMaster said.

The Iowa app was not vetted or evaluated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Christopher Krebs, the department’s cybersecurity agency director, told the New York Times on Monday night.

Kiersten Todt, managing director of the Cyber Readiness Institute, an organization started by the CEOs of businesses like Microsoft to reduce hacking risks, had expressed cautions about the app prior to Monday’s caucus. On Tuesday, she called for political parties and the federal government to do a better job of working together on elections, which she said could have helped Iowa avoid the reporting problems.

Jason Clayworth is an investigative reporter at the Des Moines Register. He can be reached at 515-699-7058 or jclayworth@dmreg.com.

The Reno Gazette Journal contributed to this article.