I hate getting political on HN and I am no longer a partisan citizen, but the story of the democratic party trying to deploy tech for its own purposes is too in

I hate getting political on HN and I am no longer a partisan citizen, but the story of the democratic party trying to deploy tech for its own purposes is too interesting to ignore. Its like they watched House of Cards and took it a little too literally, trying to loosely implement the plot-line with shockingly poor execution. Tara McGowan was a part of the organization that ran Shadow Inc, the company that made the app that fucked the vote count for the 2020 Democratic Iowa primary. BTW ,the vote count was never resolved and the DNC basically gave the state to Pete Buttigieg, who happened to be Ms McGowen's favored candidate (hmmm...). Some highlights from the wikipedia: > The Iowa Democratic Party paid Shadow Inc. $63,183 to develop the IowaReporterApp. > A bug in the code of the app caused the app to fail at the time of the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses. Gerardo Niemira, the CEO of Shadow Inc., which created the app, stated that technology used by Democrats in prior elections was a "shitshow" and "tangled morass" > Shadow came under scrutiny for its lack of maturity and the means it used to distribute the IowaReporterApp to users. Shadow required iOS device users to use Apple's behind-the-scenes beta-testing infrastructure, TestFlight, while Android users had to use third-party app TestFairy to download the app. Furthermore, a reporter from Motherboard downloaded the app to two Android devices, but it only opened on one of them. The next day, the site published an APK of the app. It also solicited the opinions of various cybersecurity experts. Dan Guido, the head of Trail of Bits, described the app as "hastily thrown together." > Not-for-profit ProPublica commissioned a security audit of the app. It was determined to be "insecure," so an external entity could have hacked it. > Several security and app experts have criticized the amateurish nature of the app. App-development expert, Kasra Rahjerdi, said "the app was clearly done by someone following a tutorial. It’s similar to projects I do with my mentees who are learning how to code." A team of researchers at Stanford University, including former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos, said that while analyzing the app, they found potentially concerning code within it, including hard-coded API keys. The app was written in React Native, authenticated through Auth0, and sent data to Google Cloud Functions. > The Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Kirsten Gillibrand presidential campaigns all made payments to the company. Hard-coded API keys... Probably pushed to a public Github repo too. src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueLink_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueLink_(company) And that's just the backstory for Ms McGowan. Some highlights from her new venture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cao3DB1apNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cao3DB1apNE They're basically unintentionally feeding the narrative of fake news and media manipulation that the GOP accuses them of.