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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

#311

Post by taurath »

Dtrane wrote: post #287
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.

If I were a good politician, I would definitely know hanlon's razor and make sure incompetence seemed plausible

Thats thinking in circles. If these hypothetical conspirators are so hyper-competent as to deliberately feign incompetence, there would be no evidence possible that could dissuade you, as all evidence against it would just be more evidence of a conspiracy.

Eventually you have to step back, take stock of your own experience with people, software, and their interactions, and make your own judgement. If you have no experiecne with software and people, then ask someone you trust who does. I don't see a whole lot of people who write software who are that surprised at what happened given the makeup of both the timing and the resources put into this app.

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

#312

Post by boring_twenties »

asdff wrote: post #282
ballark wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because for malfeasance you need to be smart and clever and for incompetence you need to be dumb or just tired that day and write a typo.

For malfeasance to remain undiscovered you need to be smart and clever.

For the kind of malfeasance that concatenates an SQL query with user input and then shows the whole thing to the user in an error message, you don't need that.

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

#313

Post by taurath »

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.

If you're to sabotage the caucuses and you're writing the software that tracks it, there's a thousand far more effective ways to do so and many of them wouldn't immediately shine a spotlight on you directly.

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

#314

Post by robomartin »

nooron wrote: post #96
robomartin wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please educate me on something. I fail to understand why "making custom software for " is something anyone would want to do in the context of owning and growing a real business. This seems fraught with all kinds of issues. First of all (and it seems I've been using this word a lot lately) this turns software development into a religion rather than a business with solid business strategy. The equivalent in other busin…

Hey, I appreciate your comment and I'm happy to share. It is very hard to make into a real business, very few people have succeeded. You do it because you believe in a cause or a candidate or a party. As far as why people don't sell to everyone, the above explains a lot. Another explanation is that political sales (which is different from true election tech, which is purchased by governments) are driven by trust and…

This is interesting and, yes, I do understand. Yet, another take on this is that groups (parties) would then rob themselves from perhaps working with or searching for the most capable of providers.

I am not trying to diminish anyone at all, but I would think these kinds of party line attachments mean that not everyone ends-up with the most capable developers, particularly so if what drives this is passion rather than a skilled software shop that with proven capabilities and experience across a range of relevant domains with an equally proven track record of delivering quality, well tested bug-free product.

Of course, the parties would have to we willing to pay more than hobby money for what they need.

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

#315

Post by boring_twenties »

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.

Don't worry, we've solved it with blockchain.

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

#316

Post by boring_twenties »

pricees wrote: post #7
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.

I don't know. I feel this may be a great application of blockchain and public ledger tech. Of course it would need to be open source... And... You know.. Obviously written in Rust.

https://xkcd.com/2030/

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

#317

Post by sschueller »

Aperocky wrote: post #196
johannes1234321 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By being an app, they can easily advise the user "download it in advance and register in advance" by that verify they have it installed. Then they can make sure the app will work to collect the data in case of wifi/mobile network issues so that the user enters the data on the caucus site and if that building for whatever reason has no network go outside to upload. Making sure that average Joe preloads a webapp and to…

But these are precinct officials, who took the time to become volunteers in this. They should be able to spend 1/100 of the effort that would take them to file taxes and preload a webapp.

If they can't open a web page they also are incapable of doing the math required on the sheet before sending the results.

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

#318

Post by robomartin »

zacharycohn wrote: post #204
robomartin wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please educate me on something. I fail to understand why "making custom software for " is something anyone would want to do in the context of owning and growing a real business. This seems fraught with all kinds of issues. First of all (and it seems I've been using this word a lot lately) this turns software development into a religion rather than a business with solid business strategy. The equivalent in other busin…

Unless they're A) very large, and B) selling commodities, a company that works with one party will not hired by the other party. The two parties have two completely different sets of infrastructure.

Maybe what I am thinking is that, if it is a real business with products that are agnostic any user would benefit from a much higher quality product. I don't know enough about software in politics to understand just how ridiculous this idea might be.

Perhaps an example might serve as a better explanation of what I am thinking:

Trello is a real company with a product that is agnostic. Politicians of any school of though can use their products to great effect. They benefit from everyone using this product, including, perhaps, their competitors and opposition.

If, on the other hand, each political party hires a passionate coder to create their own kanban board software they are very likely to end-up with a bunch of suboptimal solutions.

In other words, if they can, if the nature of the software allows, it would benefit them to look for universal providers rather than party-aligned providers. If you can trust Trello with your political party data you can then trust a similar company with other data you might produce with their software.

I guess it comes down to the software. What kinds of things are they doing that requires custom tools that have to be written specifically for one party?

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

#319

Post by dragonwriter »

pessimizer wrote: post #71
war1025 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know whether I heard correctly or if the number was accurate, but I heard someone throw out $60k as the amount paid for the app development this morning on the radio. That sounds like a lot of money to a lay-person, but assuming $100/hr, which seems like at least a reasonable ballpark rate, that breaks down to 600 man-hours, or 15 man-weeks. That is a very tight deadline to turn out a critical app like this.…

I think the plan was clearly that they would reuse the software for every caucus during this primary, so the $60K was one of a series of payments for the same product.

> I think the plan was clearly that they would reuse the software for every caucus during this primary, so the $60K was one of a series of payments for the same product.

No. The plan was that it would be used in the IA and NV caucuses, which is why the IA and NV Democratic Parties jointly purchased it.

The other states and territories using caucuses were never planning on using it. (And mostly, the other caucuses are structured differently with more primary-like features, so it probably wouldn't make sense to use shared software tailored to the IA and NV caucuses for them.)

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

#320

Post by dragonwriter »

js2 wrote: post #128
pessimizer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the plan was clearly that they would reuse the software for every caucus during this primary, so the $60K was one of a series of payments for the same product.

Only four states use caucuses (IA, NV, TX, CO).

For 2020 in the Democratic nominating process, 3 states and 3 territories, actually: IA, NV, WY, American Samoa, Guam, and the Virgin Islands.
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