The Iowa Democratic Party declined to have a new voting application vetted by the Department of Homeland Security, according to Chad Wolf, the departments acting secretary.
The app, developed by Shadow Inc., was blamed for some of the problems during the Democratic caucuses on Feb. 3. The issues led to a delay in releasing the results of the caucuses.
“Our cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency had offered to test that app from a hacking perspective,” Wolf said Feb. 4, during an appearance on “Fox & Friends.” “They declined, so were seeing a couple of issues with it.”
Theres no evidence of a hack, Wolf said.
“Right now, we dont see any malicious cyber activity going on. No one hacked into it. This is more of a stress or a load issue as well as a reporting issue that were seeing in Iowa,” he said.
“Given the amount of scrutiny that we have on election security these days, this is a concerning event, and it really goes to the public confidence of our elections.”
The Iowa Democratic Party didnt immediately respond to a request for comment about how the party tested the app. Party officials declined to provide details about the app when asked by multiple outlets before the election. Troy Price, the chairman of the state party, told NPR that the state party worked with the national partys cybersecurity team and Harvard Universitys Defending Digital Democracy project.
“We as the party have taken this very seriously, and we know how important it is for us to make sure that our process is secure and that we protect the integrity of the process,” Price said. “We want to make sure we are not relaying information that could be used against us.”
Party spokeswoman Mandy McClure said late Feb. 3 that the election results were delayed due to “quality checks” and inconsistent reporting, but said the app developed by Shadow didnt go down and wasnt hacked. Ballots provided a sound paper trail that was being used to tally the results, she added.
No email addresses or phone numbers were listed on Shadows website. The company is full of “campaign and technology veterans” who have built and put into place technology for Hillary Clintons and Barack Obamas campaigns as well as Google, the Democratic National Committee, and the AFL-CIO union, the company said.
“Our passion is to create a permanent advantage for progressive campaigns and causes through technology,” the company stated. No staff members were identified on the site.
In a statement on Feb. 4, Shadow said, “We sincerely regret the delay in the reporting of the results of last nights Iowa caucuses and the uncertainty it has caused to the candidates, their campaigns, and Democratic caucus-goers.”
Several high-level Shadow executives, including CEO Gerard Niemira, worked on Clintons 2016 campaign. Niemira was previously the chief technology officer and chief operating officer at ACRONYM, a nonprofit digital strategy firm.
Shadow was created in part from investments by ACRONYM, the nonprofits founder and CEO, Tara McGowan, said in January 2019.
In a statement issued overniRead More – Source
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