The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by asdff » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 5:19 AM UTC

awb wrote: post #39

yongjik wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for tooting the horn again, but this is really a solved problem. You go with paper ballots and vote-counting machines. The result is available pretty fast, and when there's concern you can always re-count everything by hand. This is how it's supposed to work: https://youtu.be/ViK9pe9Pv_s?t=27

> The result is available pretty fast, and when there's concern you can always re-count everything by hand. Good old progressive enhancement. Not sure why people want to rip out the old functionality (paper) until the new functionality (e-voting) has a solid track record on it's own.

Doesn't matter the track record, everything can be hacked, and will be hacked if the prize is high enough.

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

#292

Post by nl » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 5:24 AM UTC

oblib wrote: post #263

nl wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Not the person you are replying to, but..) I've used CouchDB on and off for some years[1], although I've used SQL databases for longer. I've also used NoSQL databases ranging from MongoDB to Cassandra, Hadoop, BDB (and variants), DynomoDB, etc. CouchDB (or any other NoSQL database) just isn't the best choice here. The application is literally tables of relational data with multiple simultaneous users which is pretty…

"The application is literally tables of relational data with multiple simultaneous users" How is this data "relational"? Each precinct has 3 numbers to submit for each candidate, that's not a big task for one person, and none of those precinct's candidates numbers are related to anything else in the db except the grand total of all precincts numbers and that's a one way relationship. The grand totals never change any…

> How is this data "relational"? Each precinct has 3 numbers to submit for each candidate

The numbers relate to each candidate. It's that simple!

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

#293

Post by chillwaves » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #224

astronautjones wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the solution is to modernize and stop having ridiculously archaic caucuses

Caucuses are great. High information voters who have to publicly stand by their candidate, and persuade other members of their community to support their candidate. More on the “democracy” side of the equation than the “republic” side.

That is not what happened.

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

#294

Post by r00fus » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

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…

The problem didn’t come from making software for the Buttigieg campaign but the CEOs wife was on the Buttigieg campaign and he was a supporter.

Also Shadow was openly hostile to the Sanders campaign in numerous encounters.

It’s not as bad as the CEO of a major voting software company saying he’ll “bring home the votes for Republicans” (Diebold, 2004) a but this is a clear case of conflict of interest.

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

#295

Post by asdff » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 5:31 AM UTC

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…

There's no reason why it has to be this way other than DC careers being an absolute rat race. Elections happen literally like clock work. There is no need to get an app out in 2 months; there will always be the next election if the app isn't ready to ship. Plenty of elections have happened smoothly without your app; it isn't necessary.

However, if you are only a campaign manager for six months or whatever and have to prove your worth or else move back in with your parents and spend the rest of your working life fetching coffee and slowly paying for your $200k georgetown political science degree, then yeah that app better be out in 2 damn months.

Rat races don't lead to quality, they lead to desperate people taking shortcuts and making mistakes, and fodder for managers to point to on a slide when they have to appear in front of superiors. Things that woudn't otherwise happen if pressure was lowered and we thought about things like burnout and well being rather than whatever meaningless work-related metric is hot right now. This sort of failure is inevitable in fields operating like this.

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

#296

Post by wizzard » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 5:35 AM UTC

altitudinous wrote: post #260

$50000 for a mission critical, scalable app? They got exactly what they paid for. I would have written an app that doesn't work for only $25000

Alternatively, they could have paid IBM a billion dollars and still gotten an app that didn't work. At least they saved some money?

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

#297

Post by chipotle_coyote » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 5:47 AM UTC

ballark wrote: post #251

hodgesrm wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are arguing a conspiracy of some kind it is probably best to rule out incompetence before moving on to active malfeasance. This is after all the same political party that managed rollout of the non-functioning Obamacare website.

Please provide a reason why incompetence is any likelier than malfeasance.

Well, there is long and detailed thread at the start of this page that begins with a comment from someone who started a different Democratic political software company and who turned down working on this app.

If you want a tl;dr, though, you might consider that (a) there's a paper trail, (b) the app was always intended to be optional and some precincts weren't using it in the first place, and especially (c) caucuses are not secret votes. That last one is how different campaigns had their own estimates before the official counts started coming out in haphazard fashion. Whatever bad things one can say about the idea of caucusing in general -- and we're hearing an awful lot of bad things -- they're actually pretty damn difficult to rig.

Buttigieg overperformed polling because polling only captures people's first choices. A lot of voters whose first choice candidates didn't meet the 15% qualifying point in the first round switched allegiance to him in the second, and the net effect was that a lot of moderates ended up in his camp rather than Biden's. This end result is probably an "only in a caucus" thing, but it doesn't require nefarious intent.

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

#298

Post by allovernow » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 5:47 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #280

allovernow wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What hard work? How many devs do you have to pay off to write a handful of lines of code manipulating a secret ballot, especially when they may be willing because of personal bias? We know electronic voting in its current implementation is severely vulnerable to tampering, both external and internal.

Good thing Iowa used paper ballots then. This was a tally tool, not a voting tool, luckily. I think Georgia might be the most notorious for the behavior you describe.

>I think Georgia might be the most notorious for the behavior you describe.

I don't know if you're baiting me but personally I don't think corruption is limited to Democrats. Particularly if both sides start to believe the other is secretly cheating.

It feels like the American system works when a critical majority are playing with good faith - and that good faith is increasingly lacking.

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

#299

Post by Barrin92 » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 5:47 AM UTC

krainboltgreene wrote: post #278

thedance wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The career path of prep cook -> software certification mill -> wrecking american democracy is the best thing I've ever seen.

> wrecking american democracy It's a reporting tool. How the heck did you get to this position?

it failed to reliably report on one of the traditionally pivotal elections in the American election cycle. Which is pretty bad in an era when trust in political institutions is low.

Given the numerous safety standards and qualifications we require of engineers in the most mundane jobs I'm not sure why interns get to write software that underpins the electoral process.

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

#300

Post by listenallyall » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 5:49 AM UTC

frankzinger wrote: post #272

dreamcompiler wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$60K would probably be enough to create a landline boiler room phone bank staffed with volunteers to answer the phones from people reporting results. It wouldn't have the "wow" factor, but it would be a lot more secure.

"...Iowa Democrats, on the advice of the national party, abandoned plans to have caucus results called in by phone because of security concerns and instead build an app..." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/us/politics/iowa-caucus-s...

Security concerns? The same article states "the app had to be downloaded by bypassing a phone’s security settings" (emphasis mine)