The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

This should really be getting more attention, here is an alternative breakdown: https://imgur.com/gallery/ycOC0HX.

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 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.

How long will it take our society to realize that democracy is threatened when machines are involved in voting or vote counting?

Going back to voting exclusively by ink on paper and hand counting is imperative.

I think the author's take on this is a bit heavy with hyperbole, but there's no doubt Iowa was a mess last night.

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.

With strong voter ID. Paper ballots do you no good if you can't verify that they were cast by a real person that was eligible to vote in that area, and that they only voted once.

I'm not sure what the db has to do with this, you need to structure the data somehow to be able to tally and breakdown results. SQL databases can certainly handle multiple magnitudes more transactions per second so it doesn't strike me as prima faciae bad decision making.