DHS chief says Democrats turned down offer to test Iowa caucus app for cybersecurity problems

The app at the center of Democrats' Iowa caucus fiasco wasn't vetted by the Department of Homeland Security despite an offer to do so, a top Trump administration official said.

During a Tuesday morning interview with Fox News' "Fox & Friends," acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said that his department offered to vet the now-infamous app being blamed for Monday night's electoral debacle but was turned down on the offer.

"So, our cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency has offered to test that app from a hacking perspective," Wolf said. "They declined. And so, we're seeing a couple of issues with it."

However, Wolf also went on to say that those issues didn't appear to be the result of hacking.

"Right now, we don't see any malicious cyberactivity going on," Wolf said during the interview.

In response to a follow-up question from host Steve Doocy, the acting department chief explained that "this is more of a stress or a load issue, as well as a reporting issue that we're seeing in Iowa."

No Democratic presidential candidate was declared the winner in Iowa's first-in-the-nation primary contest Monday night after the state's Democratic Party said it had found "inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results" related to a new app being used to record voting data.

In a statement put out Tuesday morning, Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price blamed Monday night's breakdown on a "coding issue" with the app.

"While the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data," Price stated. "We have determined that this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system. This issue was identified and fixed. The application's reporting issue did not impact the ability of precinct chairs to report data accurately."

In regard to cybersecurity concerns, Price's statement also said that the party has "every indication that our systems were secure and there was not a cybersecurity intrusion. In preparation for the caucuses, our systems were tested by independent cybersecurity consultants."

But hacking or no hacking, Wolf told Fox, "What I would say is that given the amount of scrutiny that we have on election security these days, this is a concerning event and it really goes to the public confidence of our elections."

In addition to the admitted software problems, the New York Times reported that not everyone who was supposed to use the app to record votes was fully trained on how to do so, with some having problems even logging on or downloading it.

Wapello County Democratic Party Chairman Zach Simonson told the newspaper, "The app wasn't included in the chair training that everyone was required to take."