App Used to Tabulate Votes Is Said to Have Been Inadequately Tested

She added that this was “simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion.” “The underlying data and paper trail is sound,” she continued, “and will simply take time to further report the results.”But multiple Iowa Democratic county chairs said they had struggled to use the app and were experiencing hold delays of up to an hour when calling into a phone hotline the party has used for decades.The Floyd County chairman said that he had three precincts unable to report results, trying both the app and the hotline. According to a person familiar with the app, its creators had repeatedly questioned the need to keep it secret, especially from the Iowa precincts where it would be used.That person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he had agreed not to discuss details of the app, said that there were concerns that the app would malfunction in areas with poor connectivity, or because of high bandwidth use, such as when many people tried to use it at the same time.“This app has never been used in any real election or tested at a statewide scale and it’s only been contemplated for use for two months now,” said David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who also serves on the board of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election integrity organization.J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan said, “This is an urgent reminder of why online voting is not ready for prime time.”Mr. Jefferson warned that Nevada was also set to use a similar mobile app to report its caucus results in a few weeks.In 2016, Iowa state officials used a Microsoft app to report results.