So what's funny is that morning, the morning before the caucuses started, I sent a message to one of the New York Times internal Slack groups and I said, guys, I'm going to be keeping a really close eye on this app that they're rolling out in Iowa because everything I've seen about it makes me think that there could be problems.

That's Shira Frankel, who covers cybersecurity for the Times.

And she'd been hearing things about the app that many precinct chairs were planning to use to

report results to the Iowa Democratic Party.

I had heard that they had insecurity tested it, that cybersecurity exports were really

concerned because they didn't know

any of the details. And already I'd seen some people tweeting that they hadn't been able to

download it onto their phones. I didn't think it was going to be as bad as it was. I mean,

we'd already filed an initial story saying, this app could be a problem. We're not sure. And then

that really quickly turned into a, yep, this app is definitely a problem.

And we have no idea how big or bad this problem is going to get.

In the last two minutes, we've heard from the Iowa State Democratic Party.

They tell us this. They say that they are doing, quote, quality control.

The issue does seem to lie with this major coding error in the app.

Caucus officials saying it was confusing and difficult to download.

All of this has put the Democrats in a bind, not just over complicated caucus results that have dragged on,

but also over a huge push within the party to regain a technological edge over the GOP.

Today on the show, how the app that failed in Iowa is just a symptom of something bigger plaguing the Democratic Party.

I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and this is What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined.

Stay with us.

Before the app that we're talking about came into play, how are things typically reported?

It was generally done in a very sort of old school, but very efficient way, and that people

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