DENVER — Shadow Inc., the tech company tied to an app that caused major problems during the Iowa caucus Monday, has an office in Denver.
Documents filed with the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office in September 2019 list a Denver address for the company’s CEO, Gerard Niemira.
9NEWS went to the address listed in the filings. A woman who opened the door to the home immediately said “no comment” before shutting it quickly.
Niemira’s LinkedIn page lists him as the CEO of Shadow Inc., a tech company with a mission “to build political power for the progressive movement by developing affordable and easy-to-use tools for teams and budgets of any size," according to its website.
The website says the company has offices in New York, Denver and Seattle, but does not list how many employees they have.
The company’s Twitter page also lists Denver for its location.
Shadow Inc. released the following statement about the situation:
"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. As the Iowa Democratic Party has confirmed, the underlying data and collection process via Shadow’s mobile caucus app was sound and accurate, but our process to transmit that caucus results data generated via the app to the IDP was not. Importantly, this issue did not affect the underlying caucus results data. We worked as quickly as possible overnight to resolve this issue, and the IDP has worked diligently to verify results. [S]hadow is an independent, for-profit technology company that contracted with the Iowa Democratic Party to build a caucus reporting mobile app, which was optional for local officials to use. The goal of the app was to ensure accuracy in a complex reporting process. We will apply the lessons learned in the future, and have already corrected the underlying technology issue. We take these issues very seriously, and are committed to improving and evolving to support the Democratic Party’s goal of modernizing its election processes."
It’s unclear if the app used in Iowa was developed in Denver.
"The data appeared to be good, it was just the communication between the app and the centralized server that was a problem," said Steve Beaty, a computer science professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver. "I think it was kind of a conjunction, if you will, of a number of different problems. First time used maybe at a very wide scale, not everybody was well trained, maybe we had some sort of overload somewhere along the line."
Beaty said they may not have tested the app at the capacity level that crippled it Monday night. The important thing to note is the vote totals weren’t compromised.
"They might take a little bit longer to get to us, but we have every reason to trust that the voting will be secure," said Beaty. "We need to make sure that our tech is all essentially perfect before we start trusting it with our most sacred things in our country."
NBC News reports the app developed by Shadow Inc. had a “coding issue” that caused delays in counting and reporting results.
In a statement, Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price said: “As part of our investigation, we determined with certainty that the underlying data collected via the app was sound. .... While the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data. We have determined that this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system.”
Shadow Inc. has not responded to 9NEWS' requests for comment.
Iowa Democrats plan to release the first results from the caucus Tuesday afternoon.
NBC News reports the Nevada State Democratic Party will not use the same app or vendor in their caucus.
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