The reporting app that is getting a large share of the blame for the chaos surrounding Monday's Democratic caucus results was working until the national party required the installation of a security patch less than 48 hours before the first-in-the-nation contest, a recent member of the Iowa Democratic Central Committee said Thursday.

The update is believed by some Iowa Democratic Party staffers to be the reason for a mismatch between the app’s coding and the state party’s computerized verification system that caused omissions in the results, said John McCormally, a former state Democratic staffer who was a member of the party's central committee until last year.

McCormally, who served as a Polk County precinct chair during Monday's caucuses, said he believes the Democratic National Committee's extra security precautions just prior to the caucuses were well-intentioned. He pointed to the 2016 presidential campaign, when WikiLeaks made public thousands of hacked emails that called into question the party’s neutrality during the primaries.

“I know people say this was a conspiracy and they (party leaders) were trying to rig results, but I don’t think that's it at all,” McCormally said of the reporting problems. “The DNC people are the people who literally had their emails hacked by WikiLeaks for the world to see. I think they are overly paranoid about hacking and security.”

McCormally said he learned of the connection between the upgrade and the app’s failure through Iowa Democratic Party staff. He provided the Des Moines Register a copy of a notification he received at 7:47 p.m. Saturday that he said required the security upgrade to the “IowaReporterApp” program.

Iowa Democratic Party spokeswoman Mandy McClure said she could neither confirm nor deny McCormally’s account. DNC spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa said the national party provided Iowa Democrats with a cybersecurity vendor to make sure the app was secure, but she did specifically comment about whether that vendor called for a security patch.

Late Thursday — after this article's original publication — Hinojosa further clarified, refuting McCormally's assertion that neither the DNC nor the cyber security vendor it provided to Iowa Democrats suggested or required an app upgrade in the final days before the caucuses.

“The DNC has absolutely no involvement in the development or coding of the app, and to blame the DNC is false,” Hinojosa said Thursday in a written statement to the Register.

Shadow Inc. designed the app for the Iowa Democratic Party. The company — linked with key Iowa and national Democrats associated with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign — began its work in August but “didn’t have a final production version” until “pretty close to caucus time,” Gerard Niemira, the company’s CEO, has told Motherboard, an online tech publication.

Shadow issued a public apology via Twitter on Tuesday, saying its officials “sincerely regret” the delay. Niemira told Motherboard he believed the problem lay in a combination of a short training window for many of the chairs and a complicated log-in process.

Caucus counting continued Thursday as the party scurried to verify results by using paper records to ensure no data was lost and there were no discrepancies. DNC Chairman Tom Perez called on the state party to recanvass the results.

While there has been no evidence that hackers tampered with Iowa’s caucuses, the app has been the subject of numerous reviews citing security or functionality shortcomings. Among them was ProPublica, which quoted technology experts who said the app was so insecure that vote totals, passwords and other sensitive information could have been intercepted.

Doug Jacobson, director of the Iowa State University Information Assurance Center, reviewed the app Thursday at the request of the Register. He said he believes a link that Iowa Democrats provided to caucus officials to download the smartphone app was on a site that had low security and was vulnerable to tampering. And he said instructions provided to users to help them troubleshoot problems were poorly written and hard to follow, setting the stage “for various possible cascading failures.”

“If there had been adequate stress testing prior to the caucuses, that would have been the first step” to avoid the problems, Jacobson said.

Among other caucus app developments:

Unanswered questions: The Iowa Democratic Party on Thursday had yet to answer key questions about its use of the app, including the identities of the national cybersecurity experts it says it used to evaluate the program before Monday’s caucus and whether the party’s payments of $63,184 in late 2019 to Shadow represent the party’s total cost for the app. IDP Spokeswoman Mandy McClure has said the party will attempt to answer those and other questions at a later date.

The Iowa Democratic Party on Thursday had yet to answer key questions about its use of the app, including the identities of the national cybersecurity experts it says it used to evaluate the program before Monday’s caucus and whether the party’s payments of $63,184 in late 2019 to Shadow represent the party’s total cost for the app. IDP Spokeswoman Mandy McClure has said the party will attempt to answer those and other questions at a later date. Buttigieg connection: Tara McGowan, a strategist with direct ties to the new app, is the sister-in-law of Ben Halle, the Iowa communications director for Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor’s campaign acknowledged in an interview with the Register. McGowan is the founder of Acronym, a nonprofit that has invested in caucus app developer Shadow Inc. She did not return calls Wednesday, and Halle declined to comment. The Buttigieg campaign paid at least $42,500 for services to Shadow in 2019, according to federal election data. Halle’s relationship with McGowan had no influence on the campaign’s decision to do business with Shadow, said Matt Corridoni, a spokesman for Buttigieg.

Tara McGowan, a strategist with direct ties to the new app, is the sister-in-law of Ben Halle, the Iowa communications director for Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor’s campaign acknowledged in an interview with the Register. McGowan is the founder of Acronym, a nonprofit that has invested in caucus app developer Shadow Inc. She did not return calls Wednesday, and Halle declined to comment. The Buttigieg campaign paid at least $42,500 for services to Shadow in 2019, according to federal election data. Halle’s relationship with McGowan had no influence on the campaign’s decision to do business with Shadow, said Matt Corridoni, a spokesman for Buttigieg. Reconsidering Shadow: Multiple political groups said they will reevaluate their relationship with Shadow, which has received more than $200,000 from Democratic and liberal-leaning advocacy groups in the past year, according to Iowa and federal campaign reports. Among those that will reevaluate or perform security performance reviews is the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and For Our Future, a coalition of organizations that include labor unions, spokespeople for the groups told the Register.

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