Nevada’s canceled caucus app also had major problems

There’s a silver lining to the Iowa caucus app debacle. To avoid a similar electoral disaster, Nevada has canceled its plans to use an app made by the same company as Iowa’s.

That decision appeared all the better on Friday, when a new report from Motherboard revealed that the app was already having serious problems during the Nevada Democratic Party’s testing. 

According to the report, when caucus volunteers tried to submit results in a test version of the app, it generated an explicable error message: “Error. Could not submit alignment.” 

The app gave no other info about what was wrong… and apparently volunteers were still receiving the message up until this week. The Nevada caucus is on February 22.

The company behind the app, Shadow, Inc., said that the Nevada app was “still in beta testing,” and that “some errors… were being fixed.” They also said the app was on track for a “successful rollout” by primary day, but we guess we’ll never know. 

Problems with an app created for the Iowa Caucus by Shadow, Inc. caused days-long confusion over Iowa caucus results. Reports about the app have found that it was hastily created, under-tested, and not approved by Homeland Security for election security. It’s become an example of how tech’s “disruption” of the status quo (in this case, manually counting line-ups in the caucus systems) can be a disaster when applied to our electoral system and, well, democracy.

Nevada has learned from Iowa’s mistakes and canceled plans to use its own version of the app the day after the Iowa caucus. Phew.