Juliette Kayyem Faults Iowa Democratic Party For Chaos After Caucuses

Precinct captain Carl Voss of Des Moines displays the Iowa Democratic Party caucus reporting app on his phone outside of the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2020.

Arjun Singh is a producer for Boston Public Radio. A California native, Arjun moved to Boston to study international relations at Boston University. Prior to working at WGBH, Arjun worked at a tech company and for a political campaign.

February 05, 2020

Updated August 07, 2023

Two days after caucusing in Iowa finished, the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) still has not released all of the results of the caucuses due to a glitch in an app being utilized by the IDP to track the caucuses.

According to Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, both the Democratic National Committee and DHS raised concerns that the app — which was developed by Shadow Inc. — could be vulnerable to hacking. Additionally, the DNC’s cybersecurity chief Bob Lord asked the IDP not to use the app, according to "The Wall Street Journal."

Though Kayyem said the developers should be faulted for creating a poor product, she said the ultimate blame should go to the IDP.

“We can hate Shadow Inc. and what they did, and [ask] how could they be so bad at app development,” Kayyem said, during an interview with Boston Public Radio on Wednesday. “In my mind, this lays squarely with the Iowa Democratic Party for their negligence. For not testing a system, for not scaling it [and] not having feedback from the customer which is the precinct heads.”

On Wednesday, the IDP announced they would release another tranche of results from the primary, but did not specify how many. As of writing, 71 percent of the resultswere avaialble.