by kitrose on 2/4/20, 7:55 PM with 382 comments
by nooron on 2/4/20, 9:51 PM
This app emerged from a mandate to make the caucus more accessible and transparent. It was well-intentioned but underfunded and lacked comprehensive organizational buy-in. Introducing tech can help but you have to spend tons of money to make it reliable and usable, then you have to spend more to train everyone in using it. This is a problem organizations of all sizes and shapes face when making massive IT changes.
Shadow is a firm that makes custom software for Democrats and progressives. It has an unnecessarily sinister name. There are not a lot of companies that make software for Democrats because it’s an awful job. You make very little money. Everyone hates you when things go wrong, which they will, because the product testing cycle and margins are nonexistent. Then everyone will assume things went wrong because you are some combination– you choose– of secretly evil, secretly working for Bernie, secretly working for The Establishment/Hillary (per someone's unpersuasive Imgur post below), or secretly working for Buttigieg.
Others have noted that Shadow also made software for the Buttigieg campaign. If you take my claims above as true, this should be unsurprising to you: a hard market where everyone hates you and no one has money to pay you is not attractive to enterprising software engineers, so there are few firms available to choose.
by 3uclid on 2/4/20, 10:13 PM
...Yikes.
by skrowl on 2/4/20, 8:47 PM
At least now I don't feel bad about when I test in production. (just kidding, I didn't feel bad before).
by LargeWu on 2/4/20, 8:53 PM
by geoff-dot on 2/5/20, 12:28 AM
Even if it is, say, 500TB of data, in 300 different formats usually those formats aren't drastically "different." Maybe I'm not understanding what the application was supposed to do to not understand why this wasn't solved every quickly. Or maybe given the timeline it was solved quickly once the right people got involved and figured out what needed to be done.
by altitudinous on 2/5/20, 4:00 AM
I would have written an app that doesn't work for only $25000
by padseeker on 2/4/20, 9:51 PM
by JackRabbitSlim on 2/5/20, 5:13 PM
Everything about this reeks of a publicity stunt to "ruin" electronic voting in the public eye.
by jessaustin on 2/5/20, 7:49 PM
by pmoriarty on 2/4/20, 8:49 PM
Going back to voting exclusively by ink on paper and hand counting is imperative.
by WheelsAtLarge on 2/5/20, 4:15 AM
My experience is that customers hate to pay for testing once they see the product running. They assume that it's done. I had a customer tell me that if I did the programming right it should always work and testing should be minimal. I had to explain to him that that's not the case with software and testing is one of the most important parts of the software development cycle. He felt it was a waste and that I was looking to add extra costs for no reason.
I bet there was not enough money. People seem to feel that a few grand will cover the costs. They figure 10k is an outrageous amount. What they don't seem to understand is that it will barely cover the costs of planning the app.
Both the developers and the people that approved the app for use need to take responsibility. Too bad since it could have saved a lot of money and time in the long run.
BTW, this could have been a Google Form with a spreadsheet as a back end. But user training would have still been an issue. You can't get around that.
by tmpz22 on 2/4/20, 9:03 PM
The reason this happens is because hundreds of millions of dollars are lit on fire during election season and all the sharks, including former Google employees, come out to swim. Even well intentioned projects get slammed by the crunch of the election season (seriously try shipping a well scaled app in < 2 months with terrible product direction) and ultimately fail - failing the needs of the entire citizenship of the country.
After the success of Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns even more money was funneled into IT as a sort of perceived silver bullet. But in 2016 it wasn't, and yet no analysis was done to correct the problems for the 2020 cycle - because the decision makers (all these "CTOs") are clueless fucks who are just there for the money and could care less about the integrity of our democratic system.
- in 2016 I worked for one of the companies in this niche and saw the bidding/sales/engineering processes first hand. FWIW I am a life long democratic voter and this makes me sick to my stomach.
by code4tee on 2/5/20, 1:12 AM
It seems pretty hard to screw that up so badly but clearly it’s quite easy to make a complete dumpster fire from those requirements.
by meristem on 2/5/20, 1:14 AM
Ok, did anyone actually design the app?
by fuqmachine on 2/5/20, 8:21 PM
by EGreg on 2/5/20, 3:08 AM
Maybe it's too hard to move to electronic voting nationwide. But every organization has governance and could use an electronic voting system based on BFT consensus of mutually distrusting parties. Vote using an app, it gets stored "on-chain", then you can check it on another app.
by trianglem on 2/5/20, 12:49 AM
by smoyer on 2/5/20, 1:43 AM
by abetlen on 2/4/20, 8:58 PM
My favorite screenshot is the last one, it looks like a generic mobile Firefox error for a misspecified URL.
by tmpz22 on 2/4/20, 8:15 PM
The jest of it is one of the most important institutions in the United States (the Democratic National Committee) uses a highly nepotistic and incompetent system for managing IT which leads to colossal failures in marketing, canvassing, and security. Not to mention massive PII violates as millions of emails, phone numbers and SSNs, are passed around in plain-text via CSV files.
The reason this happens is because hundreds of millions of dollars are lit on fire during election season and all the sharks, including former Google employees, come out to swim. Even well intentioned projects get slammed by the crunch of the election season (seriously trying shipping a well scaled app in < 2 months with terrible product direction) and ultimately fail - failing the needs of the entire citizenship of the country.
After the success of Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns even more money was funneled into IT as a sort of perceived silver bullet. But in 2016 it wasn't, and yet no analysis was done to correct the problems for the 2020 cycle - because the decision makers (all these "CTOs") are clueless fucks who are just there for the money and could care less about the integrity of our democratic system.
- in 2016 I worked for one of the companies in this niche and saw the bidding/sales/engineering processes first hand. FWIW I am a life long democratic voter and this makes me sick to my stomach.
by everdrive on 2/4/20, 9:06 PM
by allovernow on 2/4/20, 9:49 PM
Other suspicious dealings are a premature victory announcement by Buttigeig's campaign and a leak of a picture of paper tallies which included a PIN allegedly used to login to the tally app. Looking for the tweet now...
>https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2020/02/04/shado...
Edit: I'm not necessarily trying to suggest anything, but I'd like to point out that this post went from +10 to +2 in a matter of minutes.
by generalpass on 2/4/20, 9:51 PM
by killjoywashere on 2/5/20, 3:09 AM
by mindgam3 on 2/5/20, 2:30 AM
Yeah, democracy is fucked.
0. https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-app-shadow-a...
by nyounker on 2/5/20, 8:34 AM
Do the paper vote - as it was always done. Let our technology analyze it afterwords. Why are we all trying to put our technology in front of this simple device. of paper.
You all know this rule = "make a single application do one thing well."
Again, this is ridiculous from a Credibility sense. Paper + networks, Paper + mobile, forget the paper, Mobile only, Mobile + scale. Where are we at? No where and much less. Just take a paper vote and tally it. Is that so hard?
by oblib on 2/4/20, 8:53 PM
My son was there working as volunteer, and so was his ex-girlfriend, who's still a close family friend. I was chatting with them both throughout the evening and into the wee hours this morning.
They worked different locations in the Des Moines metro area and the results they reported to me were pretty close to the same in both.
I'll say this about it, it's hard to imagine that less than 4500 calls to a server over the course of an hour or two would "crash" it, or even ten times that number. And that I think an SQL db is a poor choice for an app like that.
CouchDB, or most any open source "nosql" db, would've been a better choice and, really, so would a dead simple flat file db to store the data for each precinct in and those are both very easy to build for something as simple as this.
And they didn't even need an "app" per se. All they needed was a password protected web page with a dead simple form.
What happened makes it a bit difficult to avoid pondering if the delays weren't deliberate. Whatever the case may be, the DNC is who ended up taking it on the chin.
by marcell on 2/4/20, 9:39 PM
The Iowa caucus is not a paper ballot. People stand in groups in a large multipurpose room and raise their hands for who they vote for. Depending on the viability threshold, people move to new groups and are recounted.
The exact rules are complicated and the process is run by unpaid humans. Moreover, in 2020 everyone has smartphones to post embarrassing mistakes on social media. And this year is a very crowded primary for the democrats, raising the chance for error.
Under this theory, the app is a convenient scapegoat to hide the fact that the process is inaccurate and bad. For politicians this seems pretty convenient. Who would you rather blame, and decades old tradition or an app contractor?