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The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

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Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#81

Post by jedberg »

skrowl wrote: post #8
pmoriarty wrote: post #4

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.

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.

In 2016 there were only four confirmed cases where people voted who should not have and would have been stoped with voter ID.

All four voted for Trump, but that's not super relevant. What's relevant is that it was four out of 127,000,000 votes. Even if the problem were 1,000 times worse then we know it still would have had no effect on the election, even if they were all in Wisconsin.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#82

Post by nooron »

yazboo wrote: post #78
nooron wrote: post #44

I started a company that was asked to write a proposal to make what became the app that failed last night. I declined because it was outside of our core skillset. You can read my prior comments or look at my profile to validate this. If you want my perspective as someone who started a Democratic software company, you should keep reading. This app emerged from a mandate to make the caucus more accessible and transpare…

Can you share any more about the proposal process? Where was the RFP posted? What were the evaluation criteria? I was kind of assuming that this was more of a handshake deal or a cold sell or something, surprised to hear it went through a structured bid of some kind.

I'll do my best, but I'll probably disappoint! A friend of mine who works in politics told someone in the IDP that I might be helpful because my company makes software for Democratic political campaigns. I had a conversation with the IDP staffer, learned more, and told them very quickly we wouldn't be able to help with this. They might have ran a more formal RFP beyond that, but I have no knowledge of it, because we did not advance beyond that conversation.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#83

Post by sct202 »

3uclid wrote: post #63

Checked their LinkedIn and the employees who work there. The founder is non-technical and there are two developers: one who is a "back-end intern" and the other is a front-end developer (both are fresh from bootcamps). ...Yikes.

The CTO is a former Googler SWE.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#84

Post by allovernow »

sl1ck731 wrote: post #62
allovernow wrote: post #40

The owners and staffers at Shadow INC have a severe conflict of interest. The company is loaded with former Clinton staffers and the CEO sent a tweet in support of Buttigeig, who recently paid tens of thousands to the company. 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. Lo…

Should a company's employees/CEO have to be apolitical? I'd be surprised if there is such a company where none of its employees are involved in politics in any way. Especially if its a company whose sole purpose is developing software for a political party.

No, but until recently it was professional to keep your politics private and, more importantly, when there are inconsistencies disproportionately favoring an otherwise less popular candidate, public support from employees and especially the CEO, in conjunction with a money trail, these personal indicators of bias become relevant for justification of suspicion.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#85

Post by dv_dt »

sl1ck731 wrote: post #62
allovernow wrote: post #40

The owners and staffers at Shadow INC have a severe conflict of interest. The company is loaded with former Clinton staffers and the CEO sent a tweet in support of Buttigeig, who recently paid tens of thousands to the company. 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. Lo…

Should a company's employees/CEO have to be apolitical? I'd be surprised if there is such a company where none of its employees are involved in politics in any way. Especially if its a company whose sole purpose is developing software for a political party.

If you're in the vote counting business, it's a conflict of interest to also be in the vote making business for candidates.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#86

Post by peteradio »

tmpz22 wrote: post #14

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 violations as millions of…

"clueless fucks"

Sounds like they know exactly what they are doing.

Why ship a competently built project when you can ship a broken POS and scoop up even more money?

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#87

Post by throwaway_tech »

briandear wrote: post #57
ch4s3 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in 2016 it wasn't Well, you aren't technically wrong here, but I disagree with the sentiment. The RNC leveraged a the same kind of data used by the Obama team in '12 to squeak out an Electoral College win in `16. I think it's easy to get overly ambitious with civic tech and deliver expensive garbage. However, when people stay focused and deliver then I think the results speak for themselves. While the '12 and '…

> to squeak out an Electoral College win in `16. 304 to 227 wasn’t a “squeak”

I think its a general reference to losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college and otherwise having nothing to do with the electoral college margins.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#88

Post by dv_dt »

nooron wrote: post #44

I started a company that was asked to write a proposal to make what became the app that failed last night. I declined because it was outside of our core skillset. You can read my prior comments or look at my profile to validate this. If you want my perspective as someone who started a Democratic software company, you should keep reading. This app emerged from a mandate to make the caucus more accessible and transpare…

One underlying question is why there was an app for this in the first place, when election process activists basically say do it on paper and by hand with people and audits.

Anecdotally, nations doing it that way seem to report faster than when software and electronics become involved.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#89

Post by redisman »

sl1ck731 wrote: post #62
allovernow wrote: post #40

The owners and staffers at Shadow INC have a severe conflict of interest. The company is loaded with former Clinton staffers and the CEO sent a tweet in support of Buttigeig, who recently paid tens of thousands to the company. 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. Lo…

Should a company's employees/CEO have to be apolitical? I'd be surprised if there is such a company where none of its employees are involved in politics in any way. Especially if its a company whose sole purpose is developing software for a political party.

It's easy to find a connection (left-leaning-politics-tech is a small network) and it makes for juicy conspiracy headlines.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#90

Post by redisman »

coredog64 wrote: post #74
LargeWu wrote: post #5

If there's any good that comes out of this, it's that people will hopefully see the value of physical paper ballots or records.

There always was a paper trail. The purpose of the app is/was to send a set of numbers from the precinct to central.

I'm kind of amazed at how it failed. 1,681 precincts in Iowa - that data could fit on a floppy disk.
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