ACRONYM, the left-leaning “dark money” group that bankrolled SHADOW, the company that made the now-infamous Iowa caucus app that threw the contest into complete chaos is, unsurprisingly, looking to hire a new chief of staff.
The Washington Free Beacon reports that ACRONYM posted an open position on the Daybook Washington, D.C., jobs website seeking a chief of staff just hours after they were forced to release a statement distancing themselves from SHADOW and the Iowa disaster.
ACRONYM is looking for someone with “experience implementing and maintaining accountability measures” that would “hold managers at all levels accountable for program deliverables and status updates.”
Whomever filled that position before apparently failed to check back on the nefarious-sounding SHADOW, Inc., which produced the Iowa Democratic caucus app for just $60,000, promising to collect, process, and tabulate the data from Iowa’s 1,800 precincts faster and more efficiently than hand counting caucus results. The app was never tested, it seems, and according to the Department of Homeland Security, was never screened for vulnerabilities, leaving it ripe for failure.
The company is also looking to hire a client services representative, presumably in case another one of their applications fails to work. That hire will “represent the voice of the customer to ensure we’re building the best possible tools for our users” and help potential customers “understand how technology can strengthen campaigns and help organizers be more successful.”
That’s a tough ask. SHADOW is now losing clients. As of Tuesday morning, the Nevada Democratic party, which had also hired SHADOW to create a caucus app, has cut ties with the firm.
Monday night, as Iowa caucus-goers haggled over delegates, the app crashed dramatically, leaving some precincts completely locked out of sharing their results. Others were forced to tangle with code that seemed incomplete. In the end, SHADOW’s app processed barely a quarter of the caucus results, and late Wednesday, nearly 48 hours after the Iowa caucuses closed, there is no complete data set declaring a Democratic winner in Iowa.
ACRONYM released a statement distancing itself from SHADOW Monday night, calling SHADOW an “independent” project. But the Associated Press reports that ACRONYM launched SHADOW just recently, staffing it with veterans of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign.
The connection also drew questions of conflict of interest; ACRONYM’s founder Tara McGowan, is married to Michael Halle, former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg’s senior campaign advisor. Buttigieg paid SHADOW around $42,500 for a text messaging system (though both SHADOW and Buttigieg’s campaign disavow any link between Buttigieg and the failed Iowa caucus app) and, the Free Beacon notes, McGowan appears, from her social media, to be Buttigieg supporter.
ACRONYM does have deep ties to the Democratic establishment, even if it won’t acknowledge that SHADOW appears to have been an attempt to make money off of two state-level Democratic parties. ACRONYM and it’s PAC partner, creatively named “PACRONYM,” have cashed checks from a who’s who of Democratic elite, including the House Majority PAC, affiliated with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Hollywood power player Stephen Spielberg, and far-left megadonor George Soros.
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