Iowa Breakdown Reveals Broken Election Technology Ecosystem

(Bloomberg) -- The chaos at the Iowa caucus has been blamed on a small startup called Shadow Inc., but what happened this week is also emblematic of wider problems plaguing the world of election technology.

It’s hard to get sophisticated technology companies to build such technology because most buyers have small budgets, and disappear after Election Day. In a four-year presidential election cycle, one campaign’s killer app is woefully obsolete by the next. So political parties and campaigns often create the technology themselves or hire small firms to do it for them.

“The tech companies with depth of knowledge and understanding tend to shy away from building critical voting systems,” said Charles Stewart III, a professor and elections scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

R. Michael Alvarez, a professor of political science at the California Institute of Technology, said the basic model for buying election technology and supplies “has been broken in the U.S.” Startups such as Shadow are among the only entities that have an interest in taking on the risk, he said.

The complications that Shadow faced in Iowa, from data inconsistencies to a days-long delay in the reporting of results, are only the latest in a string of tech failures in American elections. In 2012, Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign relied on a web application, dubbed Project ORCA, that was supposed to be a secret, high-tech weapon to get out the vote. Instead, it was a spectacular flop. ORCA was meant to track which voters showed up at the polls and which needed to be contacted because they hadn’t yet turned out. But insufficient training, design issues, and traffic volume left the campaign in disarray.

Terry Campo, a Republican lawyer who volunteered for Romney and saw some of the problems with ORCA first hand, said that on Election Day the get-out-the-vote team had to record the information by hand. “By 9:10, they were using paper and pencil,” he said.

President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign got rave reviews for its operation, which mined voter files and Facebook friends to identify supporters using a tool called Vertica. But, by 2016, that same set-up on Vertica was prone to 16-hour crashes when Hillary Clinton’s team used it. Ultimately, Clinton held the party’s faulty technology partially responsible for her loss to Donald Trump.

One of the priorities for Tom Perez when he took over the Democratic National Committee in 2017 was to upgrade its tech capabilities, including shifting from Vertica to BigQuery, a Google product, to analyze data. But for smaller organizations like campaigns and state party committees, the big companies don’t always offer such solutions.

The Iowa Democratic Party needed an app that officials could use to record three variables for a dozen or so candidates from 1,700 caucus sites, then report the results on the same night. To accomplish the task, the party turned to Shadow.

The company’s founder, Gerard Niemira, helped build the app that collected Iowa caucus results for Clinton’s 2016 campaign, according to a person familiar with the matter. Krista Davis and James Hickey, who also developed organizing tools for Clinton’s campaign, joined Niemira at Shadow.

The company, which began life as Groundbase, was better known for an application of the same name that allowed campaigns to store information on supporters and contact them via text. Groundbase offered tiered pricing for storing data -- $100 a month for as many as 500,000 records. The monthly charge to rent SMS capable phone lines was $1.25, with an additional cost of 2.5 cents per text message.

Federal Election Commission records show that in 2018 Groundbase was paid $38,866 by nine committees. Its biggest customer, the Arizona Democratic Party, paid about 73% of that.

To fund election technology, progressive tech startups rely on investors or groups like Acronym -- the nonprofit organization that supported Shadow -- and Higher Ground Labs, a venture fund that put money into its predecessor, Groundbase.

New Media Ventures, another nonprofit that’s been supporting progressive activists and entrepreneurs for a decade, has made developing technology for such groups one of its three funding priorities. Managing director Julie Menter says that since the 2016 election, the firm has seen a huge increase in the number of proposals it gets. There have also been more investors interested in supporting such companies, but growth in capital hasn’t been nearly as fast as that of the startups seeking it.

New Media Ventures looks for companies that will be around for years because “tech just takes time,” according to Menter. “We’re generally skeptical of apps for one-off purposes.”

One problem with political tech companies is that their customers are constrained in terms of resources and time, and often go dormant for months or years. “It’s less likely that you’ll be able to build a mega-company because of the challenges,” Menter said. Still, while investing in election technology won’t necessarily create millionaires, it is a way to have impact, she added.

To contact the reporters on this story: Alyza Sebenius in Washington at asebenius@bloomberg.net;Bill Allison in Washington DC at ballison14@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Andrew Martin at amartin146@bloomberg.net, Molly Schuetz

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