Shadow CEO feels ‘really terrible’ about caucus debacle

The CEO of the company behind the app that failed Monday night as it was being used to report results in the Iowa Democratic caucuses says his team feels “terrible” for contributing to the chaos.

As officials in Iowa continued recording caucus results Wednesday morning, Shadow Inc. CEO Gerard Niemira told Bloomberg News that he was “really disappointed” in the app’s performance on Monday night.

“I’m really disappointed that some of our technology created an issue that made the caucus difficult,” he said, adding: “We feel really terrible about that.”

“The app was sound and good,” he continued. “All the data that was produced by calculations performed by the app was correct. It did the job it was supposed to do, which is help precinct chairs in the field do the math correctly. The problem was caused by a bug in the code that transmits results data into the state party’s data warehouse.”

That led to a “catastrophic” failure as party officials around the state were attempting to report caucus results late into the evening Monday night, Niemira added.