Yahoo News obtained documents suggesting that the Democrat National Committee played an integral role in the development of the failed vote tabulation app that malfunctioned last week during the still-up-in-the-air Iowa Caucus.
The Democratic National Committee under DNC Chair Tom Perez has distanced themselves from it and laid the blame on the Iowa Democrat Party. The Chair of the state party fell on his sword and resigned.
The new documents say something else.
“An unaffiliated Democratic operative in Iowa provided Yahoo News with a copy of the contract between Shadow and the Iowa Democratic Party,” the outlet reported Thursday.
THE CONTRACT
The contract specified that the company, Shadow Inc, had to work with the DNC and provide the national party with access to its software for testing.”
According to the contract, the DNC was to receive “continual access to review the Consultant’s system configurations, security and system logs, system designs, data flow designs, security controls (preventative and detective), and operational plans for how the Consultant will use and run the Software for informational dissemination, pre-registration, tabulation, and reporting throughout the caucus process.”
The DNC was granted “extensive oversight” over the app’s development.
Shadow Contract by Sharon Weinberger on Scribd
SOUNDS LIKE A LIE
“An email provided to Yahoo News also appears to show that Seema Nanda, the CEO of the DNC, and Kat Atwater, the national party’s deputy chief technology officer, were involved in drafting the contract and requested the addition of the provision that gave them access to Shadow and the app,” Yahoo News added.
But when questioned about this email, DNC communications director Xochitl Hinojosa reportedly disputed the notion that the committee was interested in supervising the app’s development.
“We requested access to the tool solely for the purpose of doing security testing,” she said. “The DNC drafted broad language to make sure whatever vendor IDP ultimately hired was required to work with the DNC’s cyber-security consultant.”
“We did not build the application, nor did we provide ‘oversight’ of its development — that’s the vendor’s responsibility. We only provided security assistance.”
That sounds like a lie, but who are we to say.
Yet it now appears that this very same “security assistance” helped cause the chaos.
“The reporting app that is getting a large share of the blame for the chaos surrounding Monday’s Democratic caucus results was working until the national party required the installation of a security patch less than 48 hours before the first-in-the-nation contest,” The Des Moines Register reported two days after the caucus.
“The update is believed by some Iowa Democratic Party staffers to be the reason for a mismatch between the app’s coding and the state party’s computerized verification system that caused omissions in the results.”
ProPublica further confirmed last week that it is plagued by “vulnerabilities.”
“The IowaReporterApp was so insecure that vote totals, passwords, and other sensitive information could have been intercepted or even changed, according to officials at Massachusetts-based Veracode, a security firm that reviewed the software at ProPublica’s request,” the left-wing watchdog group reported. “Because of a lack of safeguards, transmissions to and from the phone were left largely unprotected.”
TIES TO BUTTIGIEG
Also of concern is the connection to Pete Buttigieg.
According to The Intercept, at least three different sources say Shadow, Inc. developed the Iowa Democratic caucus app. Those sources told The Intercept that the firm was paid by the Pete Buttigieg campaign, as well as both the Nevada and Iowa Democratic Party organizations.
The Buttigieg campaign gave Shadow more than $21,000 on July 23, 2019, according to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) filing and the reports.
Gee… the DNC lying about manipulating/screwing up voting. Who could have seen THAT coming? Who is going to be responsible for supplying the Democrat candidate with the debate questions?